Now available! 2013–2017: Sonnets, my third book of poetry and the first volume of my American Sonnet sequence, has been published by LJMcD Communications. It can be ordered through Amazon.
2013–2017: Sonnets is the first volume in Bradley J. Fest’s ongoing sequence of American sonnets, a project concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Continuing the program of poetic assemblage explored in his first two books, these poems were composed consecutively as emergent temporal snapshots documenting certain experiences of what it was like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017. Over the past decade, this ongoing experimental sonnet sequence has become: a complex encounter with time and its twenty-first-century rhythms; a document of artistic maturation; a personal archive of occasions, moments, days; a continually refreshed confrontation with the global computational hyperarchive; a discography of popular music; an extended reflection on contemporary literature, art, and culture; an increasingly multiplex meditation on the sonnet; an historical record of the troubling national situation in the United States; and a work of mourning for a world disappearing into climate emergency. The second volume, currently in progress, begins in 2018.
Eternal thanks to Lachlan J. McDougall for bringing 2013–2017 into the world and to Taylor Baldwin for the cover image.
Bradley J. Fest’s second volume of poetry, The Shape of Things, continues his project of poetic assemblage. Written in an age of ubiquitous algorithmic surveillance and increasingly catastrophic climate change, these poems both describe the shape of things in the overdeveloped world and endeavor to challenge the widespread feeling that the imagination has been foreclosed in the twenty-first century. An ambivalent hyperarchive, the collection draws influence from a number of seemingly incompatible lyric registers, including the language of contemporary theory. The Shape of Things culminates in an eponymous long poem that asks if a poiesis of “network being” is possible and suggests that there might be some other way to dance to the sounds of our present.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 