(no subject) - Peter Burghardt - Bog

"The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal everyday. The title for the book and the poems contained within are derived from the default subject line of a subjectless email. The books' composition was informed by this idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the author would clear small periods of time to write and record the observations and thoughts around himself at that moment, then send it to himself for future refinement. In this way, the book takes the shape of an impressionistic 21st-century diary, often reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the speaker's sense of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is nearly hermetically sealed in their private world, the voice becomes a frame and eventual filter for the accumulations of their immediate reality. Through a reserved staccato diction that swears itself to the syllable, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. As such, (no subject) plumbs its depths in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder"--