Buffalo Free Rapid Transit

“Days and nights in the city lowlands of this imperial core work and wear us down so completely that we have no choice but to feel everything. In such a state, in which one cannot escape being sick with the world, Joe Hall’s poetry—which I’ve been reading so long, I’ve grown up with it—is a transit map and, more bracingly, a kind of vengeance. It hews so close to the bone of existence, it chews through it; it drinks the marrow for us, transforming despair into ecstasy for us. It is, in this way, sacrificial. As Hall says, deep in the blazing guts of this book: ‘that’s the job: / touch the ashes / touch and touch / the ashes.’”—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go

“BUFRAT digs its toes into chemical effluvia & slurring waste to square up to the bad commons & enclosures of the now, asking: ‘what’s a city?’ & what’s to be done when the very infrastructures of state violence share walls with those of care work, when cop infestations, landgrabs & corporate plunder grip & foreclose prospects of life itself? Part insurgent refusal, part radical conjuration, such lines of questioning open into re-purposeful dreaming: in place of capitalist decadence with its henchmen, developers & shimmering rubble, Hall proposes the apiary & shelter without limit. Proposes, out from ‘webs of getting by,’ ‘the fugue, the thread’ — a provisional ligature for better relations, a living weave that thrums in spite of it all.”—Knar Gavin

Joe Hall was first taught poetry by Lucille Clifton and decades of bad jobs. He is a writer and educator in Buffalo, where he spends the summers in the dirt. He is the author of several other books including, People Finder, Buffalo, Pigafetta Is My Wife, Someone’s Utopia, The Devotional Poems, and Fugue & Strike.