Questions About Circulation

"How to extract "wonder from sediment," especially if the sediment is vaguely toxic? This is the central question of Charlie Malone's Questions About Circulation. One answer is to dig--the literal trace of land use, the lateral spread of material history, the billowing field of childhood memory. These poems brim with glacial moraine, crumbling mills, wild blackberry thickets, and "a big peaceful cement pond [reflecting] tarnished copper." But it is aftermath that concerns the present, and these poems haunt the body's arterial connections: "a vein is a way elsewhere, and part of a circuit." Tracing our entanglements, Charlie Malone's Questions About Circulation returns us to the ground of our senses: "and slow down/put the o in close the boy has flown.""

-Matthew Cooperman, author of Spool



"Questions About Circulation is vivid and visceral and palpable. All the perks of James Wright and Wendell Berry, and lyricism all his own. The work is somehow softly abrasive."

-Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God