ATM

by Christopher Salerno

Poetry. "Christopher Salerno's ATM is a decadent refutation of Robert Graves' quip that 'there is no poetry in money, either.' The material world and the natural world stand side by a tulip planted not beside a river bank but beside a bank machine. The bank, like a tree, has branches. 'People are getting free shipping, and all the bees are gone.' Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we're missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating."—D.A. Powell

67 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

BIO:
Christopher Salerno is the author of five books of poetry. His new book, “The Man Grave,” won the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books and is available now. Previous books include “Sun & Urn” (UGA Poetry Prize), “ATM” (Georgetown Poetry Prize), “Minimum Heroic” (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize), and “Whirligig.” From 2016-2021, he served as the editor of Saturnalia Books. His trade book, “How to Write Poetry: A Guided Journal,” was published by Calisto Media in 2020. His poetry has received the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, The Founders Prize from RHINO Magazine, the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Award, the Laurel Review Chapbook Prize, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship. His poems have appeared in New York Times Magazine, New Republic, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey where he serves as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Visit him at www.csalernopoet.com

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher Salerno's ATM is a decadent refutation of Robert Graves' quip that "there is no poetry in money, either." The material world and the natural world stand side by side: a tulip planted not beside a river bank but beside a bank machine. The bank, like a tree, has branches. "People are getting free shipping, and all the bees are gone." Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we're missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating.

[Downward · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book of poems serves as an indictment of our cultural juxtaposition between money and self, each always within arms length of each other. threaded throughout are questions about value, pinning the worth we place on the technology and abstract value of commerce with things like sustainability (of our lifestyle as nature collapses, and of life itself, as we're confronted with dying mothers and our decaying social structure). but it doesn't punt on the near erotic pull of cash, noting rightly that the financial world is fetishistic and exists within or maybe creates the power structures that construct social value. we want money because it lubricates the lifestyle that we value even though it renders that lifestyle empty, a counterfactual observation that is nonetheless true and scary. PRETTY DARK STUFF.