LAST by E.J. McAdams

What to do with the word “nature” in poetry when we are destroying nature so quickly? How do we speak, much less sing, of so much extinction and human-caused loss? E.J. McAdams’ response is to sing everything, all of it or as much as possible, sounded out, fearless, precise, surprising, shocking, in new poetic forms that better fit the drastic and frightening changes taking place on both macrolevel and microlevel: the last of a species pecking through an eggshell, the peregrine in the freezer with a beak broken from a collision, what people say after wildfire burns their entire Paradise. I recommend reading E.J. McAdams’ LAST out loud, singing/shouting each line in city parks, the subway, the office. Let it echo off the walls “amidst skyscrapers” in an elegy for our ecology/our planet/our lives that is devastating, but joyous still in its love for what was and what might still be possible: “Nature be/ Nature be was/ Nature be is/ Nature be will be.” –Marcella Durand, author of To husband is to tender

For most folks Nature and New York City are like oil and water, mutually exclusive, a non sequitur, never the twain shall meet. In LAST, McAdams creates an emulsion of the urban and the natural with rhythmic riffs on the nuanced natural history known by insiders: Gotham’s birdwatchers, environmental educators, and naturalists. It’s what I might expect if Gary Snyder lived in the city instead of the Sierra; or if Li Po got his wine buzz on along the Hudson.
–Michael Feller, Faculty, School of Visual Arts & former Chief Naturalist for NYC Parks and Recreation

LAST didn’t want to arrive before right on time…spellbinding—as if, in his sense, a phoneme or two can make the difference between saying, slaying, or saving what we love as an act of grace. E.J. acts as if he truly believes words are as magical as the world. –Julie Ezelle Patton, author of Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake

In McAdams’s LAST, poetry is “earthbound with a sweep toward the vertical,” with its stance of anticipatory grief toward writing within the Anthropocene, located in the capacious anonymity of echo and cradled by “infinite possibilities within the finite.” A thoroughly lived sense of ecology as both daily and unprecedented, ordinary and out of this world, resounds through every line: an alarm clock ringing in every second and poetry wherever you can find it, amidst the many incidental observations of a trained naturalist and compassionately observed suffering. These urban saunters of a former urban park ranger are as informative as they are enjoyable and moving. I might be biased—how could I resist a line of twelve yellows?—but this is the book that ecopoetics has been waiting for. –Jonathan Skinner, author of Chip Calls

In LAST, E.J. McAdams dares human resilience to witness extinction and what happens inside the middle voice, where “predicates of existing and happening” elevate stillness beyond survival. What the body wants in nature, to hear the wonder of sensory language—this book explores how nature’s mouth is our own if we listen. As the poet “gathers quantum choirs” into the embodiment of an eco-genesis, McAdams knows that the key to the great outdoors is internal. His “shimmerflicker” is ours—landing in the reader’s ear, “growing out of one day/forever.” –Edwin Torres, author of Quanundrum

E.J. McAdams is a poet, artist, and collaborator exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He has published five chapbooks and had a solo exhibition, an installation called Trees Are Alphabets, at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. His poems have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Pamenar Online Magazine, The Paris Review, EOAGH, eccolinguistics, About Place Journal, unarmed journal, and others. Recently, a selection of poems were collected in the anthology Poetics for the More-than-Human World. He curated the Social-Environmental-Aesthetics reading series at EXIT ART from 2009-2012.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 94 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-429-1

$18

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