The Shore

By Chris Nealon Description Reviews The five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid. Like the space heroes of his childhood, Nealon does not give in to the Dark Side in his poetry, retreat into “low-level intra-bourgeois competitiveness,” intellectualism, narcissism, or fear. Nor does he engage in “apocalypse braggadocio,” setting up the poet as a hero of the breakdown. The five long poems that make up this book are discursive, exploratory, and conversa