JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Deftly mixing documentary urgency, testimonial intensity, and visceral fragmentation, Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry powerfully engages state violence, capitalism, migration, and bodily vulnerability, creating a disorienting lyric that exposes the psycho-social brutality embedded in systems of power. So you can imagine how delighted I am to share Borzutzky’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“The poem, writes John Madera, in Nomad Science, is a state of grieving and a state of being haunted. This co-joined sense of anguish and ghostliness is most acute when Madera is interrogating the surveillance of our bodies in the Anthropocene. This ghostly grieving also lives in the language of these poems: in their rhythms, in their silences, in their ‘displacements of space.’ Containers of time and its failures, these poems ponder nothing less than what it means to make art amid the mechanical devolution of the earth and the mind.”
—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, and The Performance of Becoming Human (winner of 2016 National Book Award for Poetry)

“John Madera attends to the human condition with an acuity that expounds on our global bleakness, but he does this with such vitality, swing, and intelligence that one cannot despair of the world he conjures. In anarchy, he finds ‘bloom, / flow, plasticity, convivium’—and these poems model all that: argument and intimacy, outrage and a knotty, almost reluctant hope. Be prepared to move from a ‘chafing inscape’ into the wow/whoa/woe that constitutes the ‘quanta of love.’ The recursive lyricism of Nomad Science transforms the steep of a switchback trail into a textured horizon.”
—Elizabeth Robinson, author of many books, including Rumor, Excursive, and Vulnerability Index

Fusing dry humor, tonal nuance, and exacting language, Elaine Equi‘s poems luminously transform everyday encounters, often making the familiar feel uncanny, the off-kilter intimately felt, and the seemingly trivial shimmer with metaphysical wonder, so you can imagine how delighted I am to share Equi’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“John Madera brings a sense of awareness, activism, and innovation to all his writing. His is an engaged, wide-ranging vision. Each poem in Nomad Science dances between the macro and the micro, entangling everything from dark matter to the beauty of an avocado. This book will nourish you. As Madera says, ‘Art is food. You are what you read.’ It will also instruct—offering survival tools for our heavily mediated, surveilled daily life. Witness this poetic nomad traveling from world to world and you’ll admire his agility and drive.”
—Elaine Equi, author of many books, including Out of the Blank, The Intangibles, and Sentences and Rain

I’ve long loved Lisa Russ Spaar’s luminous, sensuous, luxurious writing, which is marvelously attuned to the protean and sometimes bewildering movements of body and mind, and to where the “borders” between them dissolve, so you can imagine how delighted I am to share Spaar’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“John Madera’s Nomad Science shimmers with an irresistible, ‘problem child’ American numen, by turns casting light and shade on, awe and indictment toward the vicissitudes, atrocities, and wonderments of the Anthropocene—upon empire, violence, technology, the cosmos, love, and language itself. Is there a philosopher, musician, phenomenologist, scientist, historian, astrologer, or writer with whom Madera hasn’t danced in his poetry’s search for meaning in the inconceivable? ‘I am there,’ Madera writes, ‘wording things into being / And counting the days, declaring it all good because it is: / It is all good, because it has been worded from wasn’t / Into is.’ Nomad Science is the news feed, the bloom scroll we’ve never needed more.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of many books, including Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems, Paradise Close, and Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry