Brandon Krieg’s “In a Public Downhill” uses its negative space as a resonance chamber, allowing its micro-turns of expression and imagination to grow expansive. These gestures make particular sense in a poem that reaches toward environmental attunement, switching between the evocative objects and ambient soundscapes of natural and unnatural worlds. But the poem also negates these environments, stores them up, or conjures them in ways that feel hypothetical. Its sonic repetitions split the difference between technological replications, such as 3D printing, and the programmed repetitions of biological life, materialized in the permutations of DNA. The poem itself is like a double-helix that’s been pulled apart, fragmented, its components left to vibrate in the wind. When the title reappears in the poem’s closing rhyme, it registers as a reassuring surprise: a little quaint, even nostalgic. Yet the return to simpler poetic pleasures sets the rest of the poem into relief, revealing that the human persists in the poem’s earlier lines only as pre-recorded traces. The poem’s pastoral thus becomes something a little apocalyptic, a warning that any nature poem might wind up a hologram playing for no one. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff
In a Public Downhill
curtain fluttering in
no room
wilds
of decay spun back on the spool,
touch chained
(a fern reads
old code)
transmitter tree
transmitter tree
“All is Loneliness” five times on repeat
misses like stereo-
lithography
the white black-
berry flowers in a public
downhill
to sea