Maneuvers

by Christopher DeWeese

War recontextualizes everything—romance, friendship, and solitude become desperate acts and cosmic jokes, ghosts run for office and ride the rails, and permanence holds no sway, making “time capsules … a crop” and “clouds … the future.” Reading like a dead war correspondent’s gonzo journalism, the poems of Christopher Deweese’s Maneuvers relay every uncanny detail of the wasted landscape, and acknowledge that absurdity becomes the only appropriate response to carnage. Each poem, the collected debris of rallies and bomb runs and campsites, give purpose to the poet that claims: “Inside me, there is all this dust I want to have a reason for.”

32 pages, Unknown Binding

First published February 29, 2012