Motion Detector

Author: Drew Gardner

Publisher: Blazevox [Books] (2025)

The voice in my head is a poor strategist,” but with Motion Detector it’s found a new plan for “escaping something that is going to break.” Drew Gardner sounds the 20th-century fin de siècle in all its pulsing waveforms: echo, whimper, doppler, alarm, decay. It’s poet as “resonating chamber, absorbed by a mechanism of power,” yet armed with the “disciplined kindness” to defuse it. Keyed to the social, his poems match pitch with the cosmic “and bring the doubt your shadow / into the circle of love.” 

—Rodney Koeneke