Rel[am]ent

Poetry. Film Studies. Winner of the 2014 Washington Prize. Crabtree’s poems provide a turbulent submersion in contemporary sorrow and despair, and yet you’ll have genuine fun in these pages. Weaving Horror anti- heroes from throughout the history of film into his exploration of our dark longings, Crabtree balances the earnest and ironic, the playful and grim, resulting in a voice unlike any other.

‘How Not to Be Lonely’ might as well be the secret title of this book, or ‘How to Be Lonely Better, ’ or More Beautifully, or Professionally, with More Anger & Echo & Hollywood Monsters. But be wary: these little lonelinesses aren’t soothing: they’re boozing and bruising and funny and wooing: they’re moving. They’ve been raised from the dead. They don’t know why they’re here–again–but they hurt. They’re shambling toward you. They want you. They want you to want them back. I think you do. You want them badly. So when they knock, let them in. Let them all in.–Ander Monson

Reading these poems, one is astounded at how delicate and tremulous the beauty of a broken heart may be. In this heart, grief is totalitarian. Being broken, the heart of these poems sees no other way but the way of its own affirmative. Their triumph is that very decision to fall into life, into such a space where language makes fractals of frost across the frozen pain.–Feng Sun Chen