For Trapped Things
The highly anticipated new book from Brian Kim Stefans—FOR TRAPPED THINGS is a collection of poems written between, roughly, 2016 and 2021. Mostly short, lyrical, tart, angry with the government, with a lot of rhymes.
“FOR TRAPPED THINGS, the latest poetry collection from polymath Brian Kim Stefans, is a dizzying slalom, taking off from Olympian slopes of literary genre and allusion, flying through uncanny valleys between exquisitely dissonant verses of an alienated artist-intellectual and the omnivorous media feed of a doom-scrolling pop culture futurist. The poet makes his hard bed, then lies in it, feeling the lumpy truth.” — Harryette Mullen
“There’s a lot of enlightened and purposeful vamping going on in this book. Lots of chatter and digital noise. A psychic turbulence trapped in endless news cycles, tweets, and posts, trapped in tradition, in form. Brian Kim Stefans is toughing it out for us, making art as the only recourse to the onslaught. I also like this book’s commitment to lyric utterance in order to depict reality, no matter how unstable, or precisely because it is unstable as the poet asks: ‘Could it be the genius of the sky was a rumor?’” — Peter Gizzi
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