Wandering Subject

Author: Eliot Cardinaux

Publisher: The Bodily Press (2025)

Wandering Subject, Eliot Cardinaux's fifth book of poetry released within the span of a year, continues the poet's trajectory through psychic displacement begun in Quiet Labor (2024). Opening with Black Swans, as an elegy to the poet's beginnings as a jazz musician in New York City, and wandering into Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer, which Palmer himself has described as "bold, distinctive, and engaging," the book concludes with Your Song Cast Out on the Wilderness, a resurfacing of the work Cardinaux began in Rope of Sand, the long-form serial poem at the end of The Ocean from Here to Here (2025).