In Your Own Words: A Beginner's Guide to Writing

Adam Fell is a break-the-mold original, poet of the strip mall and the lakeshore, bard of Pabst and gas stations and gutted cigarette machines. His brave and quirky poems hum and crackle off the pa= they wrangle with the violence in contemporary American society without wavering. They leap and leap without falling, and their incantatory grace is poignant, funny, terrifying, and profound. Erika Meitner "I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken," wrote Walt Whitman from amid the unsolved arson case of the nineteenth century. Now, from under the charred rubble of a new millennium, Adam Fell calls out to search parties and marauding zombies alike: "I am not a pioneer." Uncovering a negative poetics of identity "not" is the operative word throughout this humble and humbling work Fell alerts us to the fragility of inwardness itself. Through the smoldering embers of ruin, however, we glimpse new forms of ardor. Srikanth Reddy Adam Fell's I Am Not a Pioneer whispers right up against you and riots in your ear, "Even killing machines have to lick their cubs clean./Even men have to be emptied of their stadiums." This is the one book of poems you actually need in your backpack. Heartfelt- and breaking-it's the blueprint for what happens next and forever: bomb shelter, survival manual, a way to stay attached to the people you love. Matt Hart