#TheNewCrusades

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Against a backdrop of newsfeeds and hints of eco-doom </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>#TheNewCrusades</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> centers on a series of letters to an uncertain deity hovering above and within a particular American madness. These poems are fractured little diaries seeking a wholeness; they track the ways we move back and forth between larger social-political selves and inner-personal selves. The news here is professed through protests graffiti broken mirrors ambient radio synchronized fires and all-night newsfeeds--all of it projecting a cryptic and indefinable set of rules that churn about as permutations of some lost algorithm. They address a tamed violence held barely in check examining masculinity and fatherhood and the undercurrents of suburban domesticity. In the end they are a barrage of cries at breaking the boundary between </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>you</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>I</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> questions rising into prayers that ask </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>are we closed or open systems? Can we really know each other at all?</em></p>