Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Part historical fiction and part nature poem, NEWCOMER takes place in a wartime landscape estranged by nostalgia and American story-telling. A soldier passes through a landscape that is mutable, both familiar and foreign, while memories of home come in waves, receding and reappearing in images of crisp grass and in the sounds of wind. Military epic mixes with pastoral romance, and neither are resolved. Instead, NEWCOMER's investigation of entropic minutia suggests a very contemporary (perhaps post-traumatic) confusion of temporality, and by this turns our thoughts toward a phenomenology of historical imagination.
About the Author
Nathaniel Farrell, an educator and poet, was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York. His chapbook The Race Poems—a take on race relations during the Iraq War and the Second Intifada—appeared on Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. NEWCOMER (UDP, 2014) is his first book, a long poem set in an undefined American-soil campaign. He has published poems in 6x6, Greetings Magazine, and The Recluse. He currently resides in St. Louis.