Panic Attack, USA

Poetry. "Nate Slawson's debut collection, PANIC ATTACK, USA, is a brass-knuckled love letter to a lost world. Meet the Cerberus of Slawson's vision: spinal cords and grizzly bears, lost cities and body bags, bloodstains of dreams and birthday parties, yellowjackets and rattlesnakes, vampires and movie theaters, amens and fuck-offs, Heather Locklear and Superchunk, unidentifiable bodies of moonlight, midwestern topography and tommy guns, teeth and knee-caps, belt buckles and wanderlust. And there is more and more in the fine carousel of his brilliant wit and tenderness. Finally, a voice emerges to translate the wildfire of loneliness and memory. Each of these poems is a muscle—reflexive and close to the bone where America waits to be broken and re-cast. I trust Nate Slawson's poems to name lightning."—Rachel Eliza Griffiths

"Thank the poetry gods that there is someone like Nate Slawson in this otherwise neutered world. Thank the poetry gods that Nate Slawson writes with a hard-on. When I picture in my head what the speakers in these poems look like, this is what I come up with: a man naked on a pogo stick hopping down the street. This is a man, in other words, who lets everything hang out. This is a man who is not afraid or ashamed to tell it like is. Christ if I don't wish there were more people like this, and especially more poets like this."—from the foreword by Peter Markus

"Nate Slawson's debut collection, PANIC ATTACK, USA, is a brass-knuckled love letter to a lost world. Meet the Cerberus of Slawson's vision: spinal cords and grizzly bears, lost cities and body bags, bloodstains of dreams and birthday parties, yellowjackets and rattlesnakes, vampires and movie theaters, amens and fuck-offs, Heather Locklear and Superchunk, unidentifiable bodies of moonlight, midwestern topography and tommy guns, teeth and knee-caps, belt buckles and wanderlust. And there is more and more in the fine carousel of his brilliant wit and tenderness. Finally, a voice emerges to translate the wildfire of loneliness and memory. Each of these poems is a muscle;reflexive and close to the bone where America waits to be broken and re-cast. I trust Nate Slawson's poems to name lightning."
-Rachel Eliza Griffiths

"These poems are as obsessively inventive as a stalker, as hurt as a pony with a knife in its soul, as surprising as a forest fire in your mouth, as fixated on actual love and the notion of love and the loss of love as I hope never to be, though if I am, this will be the book I should have written, in the future when it's not possible to write this book because Nate Slawson did, when I will turn to it to understand how I should have screamed and lauded when I had the chance."
- Bob Hicok

"Thank the poetry gods that there is someone like Nate Slawson in this otherwise neutered world. Thank the poetry gods that Nate Slawson writes with a hard-on. When I picture in my head what the speakers in these poems look like, this is what I come up with: a man naked on a pogo stick hopping down the street. This is a man, in other words, who lets everything hang out. This is a man who is not afraid or ashamed to tell it like is. Christ if I don't wish there were more people like this, and especially more poets like this."
- from the foreword by Peter Markus

Nate Slawson is the author of PANIC ATTACK, USA (YesYes Books, 2011) and two chapbooks, The Tiny Jukebox (H_NGM_N Books, 2009) and A Mixtape Called Zooey Deschanel (Line4, 2009). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in diode, Handsome, alice blue, Slope, Cannibal, horse less review, Corduroy Mtn., Forklift, Ohio, DIAGRAM, Typo, and other places. He lives in Chicago where he teaches and runs cinematheque, an indie press that publishes chapbooks of poetry and prose.