For Trapped Things

Author: Brian Kim Stefans

Publisher: Roof Books (2023)

For Trapped Things by Brian Kim Stefans collects poems written during our recent overlapping crises: environmental degradation, the dangerous election, the imposition of false freedoms by techno-capitalism, and the increasingly fraught relationship of the individual and the State. By turns fierce, funny, vulnerable, and elegiac, the poems engage both with traditional forms and meters as much as with recent developments in the “avant-grade.”

Sprinkled throughout the book are a meditative set of poems inspired by lines of Rilke, a group of satirical poems starting with lines by Walt Whitman, and a dizzying group of poems, “The Wild Body,” that draws on George Carlin as much as it does Friedrich Nietzsche (and many others!). Stefans’s perspective is global—as the first poem, “Overture,” establishes—while envisioning the subject as what, well, it is: “trapped” in a mesh of emotions, the body, and myriad relations.