Underrated Provinces by Joel Chace

Praise for 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 nothing 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 triumph 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, a