JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

I’ve long loved Rae Armantrout’s ingenious, lyrical, witty, probing poems, so you can imagine my great delight to share Armantrout’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“In his poem ‘No Things but in Ideas,’ John Madera identifies first as a succulent, then as spider plant twisting itself toward a distant light. There’s something appealingly modest and persistent in this image. It is also an apt way to describe what Madera does in Nomad Science as a whole: his work here acknowledges death but seeks out life-forwarding currents in an often otherwise hostile environment. We need more of that.”
—Rae Armantrout, author of many books, including Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure, and Versed (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

Rigoberto González‘s vital, lyrical, syncretic writing across the genres always inspires, so you can imagine my immense delight to share González’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“Each of John Madera’s poems is a linguistic journey inviting us to ponder our everyday encounters with the human and the machine, and to elevate them into the imaginative, intelligent landscape of language and knowledge. Nomad Science is playful, cerebral, and altogether brilliant.”
—Rigoberto González, author of many books, including To the Boy Who Was Night, The Book of Ruin, and Unpeopled Eden

I’ve long reveled in Cole Swensen‘s brilliant, luminous, and profoundly intro- and extrospective writing, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Swensen’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“These clear musings take an ambling gait, reflecting a mind both pensive and piercing, exuding a calm, yet committed attention to the things of this world. Madera ponders the big questions, such as existence and the Milky Way, but also the small ones—the Oxford comma and invisible pathogens—and all by way of their precise details. There’s a generous exactitude to the whole, which gives our world back to us, once again marvelously strange.”
—Cole Swensen, author of many books, including most recently And And And, Art in Time, On Walking On, and Landscapes on a Train

Delighted to share that Spuyten Duyvil Press will be publishing Nomad Science, my debut poetry collection, in 2026! Big thanks to Tod Thilleman and everyone at Spuyten Duyvil Press!

Here’s a description of the book:

Nomad Science finds John Madera singing the diasporic mind and body in counterpoint with and discordance against exilic lostness, cyber-tech, social media, societies of control, and horror vacui within the data fog. Sonorous, contemplative, formally daring, and deeply critical of the so-called order of things, these poems move fluidly among lyric meditation, political witness, scientific inquiry, intimate sensuality, and shared sanctuary. What emerges is not a thesis but a charged field of perception—poems that think, feel, and refuse to look away.

At its core, Nomad Science explores consciousness under pressure: language breaking and recomposing, systems lagging and glitching, the body and mind registering overload, collapse, and mediated attention. Madera deploys a scientific lexicon—data, entropy, black holes, synapses, systems—not as metaphor alone but as a dynamic tool, situating private experience within planetary, climacteric, and hyper-objectual scales. The collection’s sinuous sentences, digressions, and sudden lyric compressions formally enact the mental and ethical states they examine. Recurring motifs—loss, birds, rain, riot, machines, disappearance—form a dense internal network, unifying the poems into a single pulsing system.

Politically unflinching, Nomad Science confronts state violence, ecological collapse, surveillance capitalism, and contagion anomie without devolving into slogan or sermon. Yet it is equally a book of care: walking, cooking, loving, imagining, creating, sleeping—acts that do not offer escape but affirm intimacy as a mode of revolt as systems fray. Imbued with wonder and humor, Nomad Science is a luminous meditation on mind and matter, tracking thought and moods as they traverse love and grief, bodies and machines, language and weather, testing, step by step, what holds, what breaks, what throbs and hums.