“Days and nights in the city lowlands of this imperial core work and wear us down so completely that we have no choice but to feel everything. In such a state, in which one cannot escape being sick with the world, Joe Hall’s poetry—which I’ve been reading so long, I’ve grown up with it—is a transit map and, more bracingly, a kind of vengeance. It hews so close to the bone of existence, it chews through it; it drinks the marrow for us, transforming despair into ecstasy for us. It is, in this way, sacrificial. As Hall says, deep in the blazing guts of this book: ‘that’s the job: / touch the ashes / touch and touch / the ashes.’”

“Buffalo Free Rapid Transit digs its toes into chemical effluvia & slurring waste to square up to the bad commons & enclosures of the now, asking: ‘what’s a city?’ & what’s to be done when the very infrastructures of state violence share walls with those of care work, when cop infestations, landgrabs & corporate plunder grip & foreclose prospects of life itself? Part insurgent refusal, part radical conjuration, such lines of questioning open into re-purposeful dreaming: in place of capitalist decadence with its henchmen, developers & shimmering rubble, Hall proposes the apiary & shelter without limit.”