Chris Nealon

Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry, All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it. "You almost let your ego go," he writes, "but oh-/maybe tomorrow." Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet's address shifts in these poems from "I" to "you"...

The five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of...