Panic Attack, USA
These poems are as obsessively inventive as a stalker, as hurt as a pony with a knife in its soul, as surprising as a forest fire in your mouth, as fixated on actual love and the notion of love and the loss of love as I hope never to be, though if I am, this will be the book I should have written, in the future when it's not possible to write this book because Nate Slawson did, when I will turn to it to understand how I should have screamed and lauded when I had the chance. --Bob HicokNate Slawson is a visionary force in a new generation of younger, innovative poets. His work blends personal discovery with magical dimensions of the unexpected and the revelatory. In readingPanic Attack, USA, his experiences become my own and they transcend beyond their power on the page to welcome others. This means an important poet is living a life of poetry through fresh uses of language seeing it, sharing it, and making the reader want more. --Ray GonzalezBut what if it turns out we never belonged/can we go back in time to when/you were a wheat field & I was/a meadowlark in the thresher/of your delicate teeth?I'm convinced that Nate Slawson knows better than anyone the particular sorrowing and celebration of throwing a parade in the forest we built with our teeth by keg of birds by new rabbit's foot by very river by sleeping pill heart of afternoon and it is a brilliant relief to me that he has named these urgencies, has turned them into poems that are so tender and immense. --Allison Titus