Lost Horizon

Author: Nathaniel Farrell 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)

Taking as a point of departure the retail utopia of the American mallscape––a composite of town square, garden and space station––Lost Horizon spirals out through interstate and rail to touch national parks, local attractions, truck stops, big box stores, strip malls, tattoo parlors, oil rigs, flower shops, and baggage claims. Throughout the incessant movement of the book-length poem, unbroken by stanzas or sections, Farrell privileges observation over judgment and seeks out the crossroads between cultural myth and brand image. The poem speaks from between the mall fountain and the wishing well, the Disney princess and Spenserian queen, the noble hero and the voyeur. Lost Horizon is a poem that catalogs and indexes the collision between fantasies of high and low.