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Expressway
Shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General's Award for Poetry!
This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.
Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.
Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras's stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. 'Cleanse the doors of perception,' Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome — each decision can make or unmake us.
This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice.
Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.
Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
Echoing the pastoral and elegiac modes of the Romantic poets, whose reverence for nature never prevented them from addressing it with all the ideas and sensibilities their times allowed, Sina Queyras's stunning collection explores the infrastructures and means of modern mobility. Addressing the human project not so much as something imposed on nature but as an increasingly disturbing activity within it, Expressway exposes the paradox of modern the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. 'Cleanse the doors of perception,' Blake urged, and with that in mind, Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome — each decision can make or unmake us.
104 pages, Paperback
First published April 14, 2005
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About the author
Sina Queyras
19 books52 followersSina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 28, 2009
good companion for Juliana Spahr's Fuck You Aloha I Love You
March 22, 2010
"Go forth and do."
July 8, 2015
5000/5
March 1, 2022
‘alles nahe werde fern’: in foregrounding the urban sprawl, the superiority of the ecological seeps in the gaps and fissures of the “expressway”.
writing style per chapter emulates different types of poetics from romantic poets— the surplus of metaphors about nature, but with the expressway as “nature”— the urban jungle.
—
“Where man is, nature is bereft.
Where nature is not man, is not known.
Where nature is not natural, man is not man.”
“Go forth and undo.”
“Go forth and do.”
writing style per chapter emulates different types of poetics from romantic poets— the surplus of metaphors about nature, but with the expressway as “nature”— the urban jungle.
—
“Where man is, nature is bereft.
Where nature is not man, is not known.
Where nature is not natural, man is not man.”
“Go forth and undo.”
“Go forth and do.”
October 8, 2019
Some lovely stuff. I sort of lost my appetite about two thirds in. I may have to reread. At least to lock down the best ones because they were superlative. The book has a few flats though pun intended
February 3, 2023
KSKS
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 6, 2013
Amazing and inspiring.
April 21, 2017
I'm not equipped to critique poetry, let's just say I really enjoyed this thematic collection. My thoughts can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/04/21/mu...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews