Underrated Provinces

Nation is a fragile construct, and rarely more fragile than in Joel Chace's tensive, meditative lyrics. Placemaking and placelessness jostle here as songlines torn from a past that is never quite done thinking of us. Chace's lyrics hang in fixed frames like paintings on a wall-here is a village flooded by a hydro project; here is a library; here is a trombone- even as they collate the disparate voices of a United States sliding into representations of itself. In Underrated Provinces, the mouth calls noth- ing home except the voice that escapes it.

-G. C. Waldrep, author of The Earliest Witnesses

Joel Chace's astounding taut-lined Underrated Provinces seems a coat hung on a point of light in one of history's dark maneuvers. It's a tri- umph to be savored again and again.

-Noelle Kocot, author of Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems and Ascent of the Mothers

Underrated Provinces takes us into an arresting dream vision of a drowned and burning world, and sets sail. Words bubble up from the page in uncanny spaces, through door frames, halls and school rooms, in translations of grain elevators, the making and unmaking of towns and canals. This is America as reverie, shaped by the forces of living architecture, in headlong transit amongst the ruins of the future, with the resources of the past-ancient lost libraries, painting, song, mu- sic-scattered, beautiful and strange. What will it mean to find a mouth to say it? What new language will possess the air? And as they travel, who will let them in?

-Carol Watts, author of Occasionals, When Blue Light Falls, and Kelptown