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Buffalo Free Rapid Transit
Immerse yourself in a surreal, social poetics in a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city.
The sequel to Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Fugue & Strike, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through the city with a love letter to Buffalonians trying to get by.
In these poems, a cop cracks Martin Gugino’s head open in front of the world; the wildfires of Ontario smudge the skies above while a home burns below; a white terrorist massacres ten members of Buffalo’s Black community; and a city’s failed response to a blizzard contributes to the deaths of forty-seven people. Hall grapples with Buffalo’s decades of abandonment and its prominence in 2020-2023 as the site of violence and disaster that grabbed national headlines. Through it all, as Hall shows, Buffalonians had to live and cope and work and dream. The long and searching lines of these poems come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of Buffalo’s better future crack open into each other.
The sequel to Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Fugue & Strike, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through the city with a love letter to Buffalonians trying to get by.
In these poems, a cop cracks Martin Gugino’s head open in front of the world; the wildfires of Ontario smudge the skies above while a home burns below; a white terrorist massacres ten members of Buffalo’s Black community; and a city’s failed response to a blizzard contributes to the deaths of forty-seven people. Hall grapples with Buffalo’s decades of abandonment and its prominence in 2020-2023 as the site of violence and disaster that grabbed national headlines. Through it all, as Hall shows, Buffalonians had to live and cope and work and dream. The long and searching lines of these poems come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of Buffalo’s better future crack open into each other.
112 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2026
About the author
Joe Hall
24 books105 followersJoe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, Peach Mag, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Ethel Zine, Gulf Coast, Best Buds! Collective, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center.
http://www.blackocean.org/hall/
http://www.blackocean.org/hall/
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Review of advance copy received from Author
Buffalo Free Rapid Transit is made from love and rage and the shredded trains of shredded futures, angel ligaments, bus rides, friends, friends on bikes, dreams of difference, cruel glittering snow, friends in gardens, the many unnatural disasters this city has suffered in this past five years and all the rust and all the sparking haywire power structures of this small city at the edge of the imperial core.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review