Spider Cone

Author: A.L. Nielsen

Publisher: selva oscura press (2022)

"The quirky and witty imagination at work in these poems brings to light a linguistic world full of the delightful turns of day-to-day speech, structured within a poetics that foregrounds the phrase as a unit of measure and syntactical syncopation as a measure of rhythm. A.L. Nielsen’s verse operates across a range of cultural, musical, and social reference—sometimes within a single poem—that is often astonishing. At a time when work that explores the nexus of the personal, the sociopolitical, and the cultural sometimes results in dour, moralistic self-righteousness and virtue testing, it’s delightful to read poetry like Nielsen’s, which is at once keyed to the peculiarities of our time while being so much fun to read."

-Geoffrey Jacques