Joel Felix

Joel Felix has always been a bellwether poet, a bard of what is wrong with the status quo in the world and in us.  At this genocidal moment, I come back to “Kill Chain,” a long poem from Felix’s last full-length book, “Concealed Nations” that seems ever so timely.  Here is a little of what I wrote a few years ago about that poem: “As we read, we move from the point of view and technical jargon of a military drone operator to the worlds of air traffic control, of parking lots and even kitchens with pickled ginger, in language permeated by hints of technological menace. In this disquisition on the ascendancy of digital data and the spaceless moral vertigo it induces, we are left wondering about everything that the poem describes, “Why should it not explode?””  Anticipating a reading from Felix’s most recent work, “Holograms of Dawn,” about the twisted history of the River Rouge watershed near and in Detroit, I look forward to an eloquent slap in the face: the same collage of disturbing murmurings and incriminating assertions, the same queasy engagement with our own obfuscated relationship to the world as it is, but also the same uncanny beauty that breaks out unannounced in many of his poems.  Felix gives us a language that can help us grapple with a reality both stagnant and tainted, recognize how we are implicated in it, and envision how to change.  Important and impressive.