“The brilliant serial prose poems of Eminent Domain frame a troubled scintillating world between animate/inanimate realities, bleak and transcendent at the same time.... This is a new Wasteland. Welcome an original consciousness from the belly of the beast.”—Anne Waldman

Justin Petropoulos: Eminent Domain

The title references the power of the state to seize a citizen’s property, yet this book reclaims and prioritizes human imagination and vision.  These are works in the lineage of Rimbaud, keen, sharp, witty, un-sentimental yet curiously visceral and emotionally powerful. Justin Petropoulos mirrors back at us a reflection of the diamond-faceted juxtaposed particulars in the face of our Anthropocene Age. Animals abound, caught in civilization’s web:  moths, cranes, spiders, sparrows, the isosceles comings and goings of ducks,  a butterfly or is it a butterfly chair morphing into blue? Snakes disappear “lassoed off by wind”, a “chorus of crickets”  are “chirping at Polaris” and lozenges nest in the” mud-throats of loons”. Petropoulos’s steady eye on the larger cosmos also holds: “She sees an infinite rack of stray planets in a garlic clove…” It’s quite a ride.  The crystalline surreal phrases keep humming and surprising in this post-modern apocalyptic world.  A “bulldozer’s exhaustoria”, a “mannequin’s fennel suit”,  refugee camps, strontium 90, “martial-like curfews”, turret guns, border zones, fluorescent dyes, styrofoam skies resound “as if history were a tea-stained sink”.  This is a new Wasteland. Welcome an original consciousness from the belly of the beast.—Anne Waldman

For the child of such heavyweight parents—Wittgenstein, George Oppen, the Ashbery of Three Poems—Eminent Domain is a remarkably self-effacing offspring, a book that for all its difficulty remains witty, lyrical and engaging. Justin Petropoulos puts language through its paces but his object is to bewitch rather than befuddle, to enlighten rather than to confound; when he says “Close your eyes and I’ll let you in,” he really means it. Rigorous, smart and seductive, this is a terrific first book.—Campbell McGrath

This precision-cut sequence by Justin Petropoulos is driven by converging poetic desires: communicability of experience, accountability to rule, and appetites in excess of instrumental reason. Eminent Domain is original storytelling: equal parts treatise, screen memory, and “orgy of inconvertible note issues.” Its prose pictures body united to its “failed autopsy,” voice joined to legal tender, metropolis and home as mutual ceremonies of knowledge. The energy of this prose poetry is invigorating.—Roberto Tejada

 

Justin Petropoulos’ poems have appeared in A cappella Zoo, American Letters & Commentary, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Gulf Coast, Mandorla and Portland Review. He received his MFA from Indiana University.He lives in Brooklyn, New York where he and co-curates Triptych Readings (www.triptychreading.com) with poets Mary Austin Speaker and Anne Lovering Rounds.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9841177-9-6(pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-9841177-9-2 (pbk.)
$15.00

Poems from Eminent Domain

5.04 (from Passive Voice)

The sun sets in the spine. She turns the page and misspells his eyes, scours her inseam with orange peels in the dark, but she doesn’t recognize his fingers. He steams from her, basically, like thymine. A second skin secreted from without herself.

Invisibly the statement follows by induction. When considering that there exists an ordering such that the variable (n) denotes the dimension of the corresponding complex space. Let’s take for example the word inter( )ment.

A room balloons. Beyond its sills, border patrols convey our isosceles comings and goings toward a perfectly elastic supply curve for labor under the guise of a national agricultural initiative. The other day I watched a woman work soil from stone and even my cough assembled slower. Our relief tendered from a single glacier. All this rain transgressing, called back into being and being lost.

They give us everything here. I would be eating crow if I complained. They are kind, feed us. But I spend hours arranging peppercorns: stick figures in the throws of a waltz, a pair of spectacles. I had my own orchard. I miss it. Here we are just pacing. We chew cured beef, dried apricots, sleep a bit, and talk. We are talking so much.

 

9.03 (from The Velocity of a Body Together)

Night-blooming cereus crowds an iron-worked window white. Her legs creak the shutter’s sanctions. Hinges of loose light trade routes with our bodies, the floor.

A butterfly or butterfly chair eats itself blue. For a struck matchbook of evenings, cork-soled dancers keep the owls at bay. I have always loved to dance and it seems that real wages can go even further virtually unchanged since the innerspring mattress was invented in 1925. At that moment I was at the river, doing laundry.

Clearly we are now embedded in complex questions of timing. I heard the gunshots. The doors easily ajar. Nervous for the others—desiring them—wanting them to run. Their collisions spark; eyes pretend together, retreat sadly. Fortunately I found some money in a pair of trousers. To avoid detection, he quiets the infant’s cough with opium. I didn’t look for my mother.

Milkweed like a fever we move through. Very fine particles released. After collapse. The velocity of a body — together.