Eminent Domain

Winner of the 2010 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Anne Waldman, who said: "The brilliant serial prose poems of 'Eminent Domain' frame a troubled, scintillating world between animate/inanimate realities, bleak and transcendent at the same time. The title references the power of the state to seize a citizen's property, yet this book reclaims and prioritizes human imagination and vision. These are works in the lineage of Rimbaud, keen, sharp, witty, unsentimental yet curiously visceral and emotionally powerful. Justin Petropoulos mirrors back at us a reflection of the diamond-faceted juxtaposed particulars in the face of our Anthropocene Age. Animals abound, caught in civilization's web: moths, cranes, spiders, sparrows, the isosceles comings and goings of ducks, a butterfly or is it a butterfly chair morphing into blue? Snakes disappear 'lassoed off by wind,' a 'chorus of crickets' is 'chirping at Polaris' and lozenges nest in the 'mud-throats of loons.' Petropoulos's steady eye on the larger cosmos also holds: 'She sees an infinite rack of stray planets in a garlic clove....' It's quite a ride. The crystalline surreal phrases keep humming and surprising in this postmodern apocalyptic world. A 'bulldozer's exhaustoria,' a 'mannequin's fennel suit,' refugee camps, strontium 90, 'martial-like curfews,' turret guns, border zones, fluorescent dyes, Styrofoam skies resound 'as if history were a tea-stained sink.' This is a new 'Waste Land.' Welcome an original consciousness from the belly of the beast."