JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

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

Andrew Joron’s poetry marvelously fuses scientific speculation and philosophical inquiry with an acute attention to the sonic textures of language, so you can imagine how delighted I am to share Joron’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“There is no mad science like poetry: John Madera’s Nomad Science proves it. These poems migrate through the pores of lived experience, collecting evidence that rupture and rapture are the same. Using his own version of poetic science, Madera has discovered how to sing upon the precipice of a system blinking red. Rippling with sonic and semantic interplay, driven by ecstatic doubt, Madera’s work operates at multiple levels, from the socio-personal to the cosmic. Against disaster, this poet takes the wide view: ‘To be at the end of the world,’ Madera writes, ‘is to be at the beginning / Of another one.’”
—Andrew Joron, author of many books, including O0, The Sound Mirror, Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, and The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose

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)