Spuyten Duyvil Press Will Publish Nomad Science!

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, technological, 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.