Before Leaving the Island

Before you leave your own island, be sure to explore John Fadely's. Along the shore, your signals are jammed with true hyperbole, as in every good poem's interference against the usual. Below the ground, you interrogate the poem exactly as you read it. Navigate the shoals in order to find scraps of wisdom not from but for Confucius. The notes map the journey you've taken along with Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac, Gustave Caillebotte, Khalil Gibran, and Shakespeare's 29th sonnet where he and we sing the outcast hymns.

-Al Filreis, Kelly Professor, University of Pennsylvania

John Fadely's debut collection is rich with inventive language, engaging forms and the realities of leaving one land and transitioning to another. These poems contain an honest believable voice from a life lived globally but studded with small intimate moments shining through. Each poem is gleaming in a varnish of light.

-Tina Schumann, author of Boneyard Heresies

In Fadely's collection, the echoes of Donne's "no man is an island" resonate as poems deeply connected to lyrical traditions, ancient and modern, navigate the flux of continents and cultures. These verses move with striking versatility, from moments of fierce, high-stakes questioning to scenes of tender, quiet reflection. Contemplative, at times experimental, and rooted in both inherited and personal myths, the poems feel pleasurable and necessary, charting a poet's honest journey to locate oneself within life's vast, shifting geographies.

-Jake Marmer, author of Cosmic Diaspora

John Fadely's poems are distilled meditations on topics as quotidian as a cycle of cicadas or as jolting as the sudden death of a woman in her prime. In reading them, I'm reminded of Dos Passos's vignettes-informative, disruptive, descriptive, charming, disturbing. Working from a cosmopolitan palette with Asian influences, Fadely toys with time, undermines death, and teases nature into revealing a secret or two, in words that delight in themselves.

-Brian Bruya, Professor, Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University and author of Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation