United States

Dan Featherston

Poetry

Factory School. 2005. 72 pages, perfect bound, 6.5x9.

ISBN: 1-60001-040-7

Description: These poems bear witness to various atrocities at large and domestically, but also to the role that liberal Democratic ideology plays in the atrocities of genocide and cultural imperialism. Poets like Dan Featherston go a long way toward making the reader aware of the artifice of politics and the poetics of ideology. In this way, poets can be more than spectators. Featherston is certainly more than a spectator. It is his lyric vision and the communitarian commitment of his collection that reminds the reader that poetry is, in fact, a public act. —Richard Deming

Heretical Texts

Dan Featherston is a poet, scholar, and teacher. His books of poetry include The Clock Maker's Memoir (Cuneiform Press, forthcoming 2007), United States (Factory School, 2005), and Into the Earth (Quarry Press, 2005). Shorter collections include The Clock Maker's Memoir: 112 (Handwritten Press, 2002), 26 Islands (Primitive Publications, 1999), Anatomies (Potes & Poets Press, 1998), and Rooms (PaperBrain Press, 1998). He teaches at Kutztown University and lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their dog Fredo.

Webspace: faculty.kutztown.edu/feathers
Contact: danfeatherston "at" hotmail.com

More about United States:

United States happens to be one of the most original and interesting books of poetry to cross my desk in ages. To grand advantage Dan Featherston uses Whitman's tag as a throughline— "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." . . . The book is filled with triumphs, poems I wish I had written, among them Chaplin's Modern Times in the form of a serial poem. And my favorite, the Columbine shootings reenvisioned in terms of Italian harlequinade, why not, they called the place "Columbine" for a reason: "two by two the turbine turning through Columbine / in love with Harlequin, / demon huntsman / America will not face as its own: / he who would hunt his own, / whose eyes narrow with hate, / cowering before Father War's poltroonery."

We're all trying desperately to think of ways to write a poetry that would keep pace with our politics, and this book, new from innovating Factory School, may go down in people's memory as the key to this dilemma. . . . I could spend all day talking up these poems, but you must see the piece "Threat Conditions" in which the different Homeland Security colors (what are we in now, code red?) are reimagined according to the famous "Voyelles" poem of Rimbaud. Afterwards you're kicking yourself thinking, why didn't I see it, and then reality sets in and you know, that's okay, don't blame yourself, only a seer could have put these pieces together and turned them into a poem, a book of poems with that presumptuous title, "United States," only a magus. —Kevin Killian