JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Through inventive wordplay and experimental forms, Edwin Torres creates vital work that challenges perception, engages urban and diasporic experience, and pushes language beyond conventional boundaries; so you can imagine how delighted I am to share Torres’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“There is a science to the unfolding rhizome, a quantum tenderness to a poet’s search engine, asking what it means to nomad through no-madness. With this book, John Madera treats the poet as an emotion-adjacent superbeing, compared to mere human neighbors, giving us a newly conjured surrounding to exist in—’my imagination, / Supersonic, soaring, making time and space for space-time.’ To shroud fellow searchers with implication is to render a thousand and one nights their backlog. As a dystopian Scheherazade evoking prana for the digital citizenship, Madera weaves Blanchot into Stevens into Hemingway into cyber-gogue with a breathless rush of words unearthed from our programmed errata, knowing that language will survive us, as both savior and mineshaft. ‘To be at the end of the world is to be at the beginning / Of another one,’ Madera writes. Pay heed wanderers, Nomad Science is a love note for the dominant requiem.”
—Edwin Torres, author of Feel Recordings in the Evershift and Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (winner of a 2022 American Book Award)  

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