(I couldn’t quite ignore the fact that he never paid his fare.) We are left in consternation, not for the last time in this book.Īll of the prose pieces serve to reinforce and elucidate the themes of Concealed Nations, but also to discomfit us. Enraged, he leaves his cab: “Who is she? Bitch! Who are you? … I will beat her, I will beat her.” Felix desperately distracts the man by claiming someone has damaged the car, then ends up hiding in a storefront.
Asked about how it is to be a cab driver in Chicago, the driver simply says “hard.” Soon after, speeding through alleys amid heavy traffic, the cab driver almost hits a female pedestrian she gives him the finger. He hails a Pakistani-American cab driver to take him to a famous deli. The book opens with one of them, “Fall 1,” in which, after the speaker (we assume he is Felix) briefly explores his sense of dislocation from the Loop as a returned former resident of Chicago, events cascade into paroxysm. Many of the most striking poems in Concealed Nations brilliantly use familiar techniques of modernist poetry-the fragment, collage, allusion, image and enjambment-to illuminate the interpenetration of paranoid behavior and ideology with what in his previous book he termed the “illegible violence of the state.” Others, however, movingly reveal a resilient, resistant, vital core that violence does not squelch.Īs in his previous book, Felix’s poetry in Concealed Nations is interspersed with prose pieces that stand somewhere between poems and essays. In both books, Felix is interested in the intersection between American subjectivities and the oppressive patterns of ideology and history that help shape them. Concealed Nations is Felix’s second full-length collection of poetry, preceded by The Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die, a meditation on his personal pilgrimage to civil rights sites throughout the North and South and on the memories, forgetfulness and violence grafted onto those sites. Male anxiety, embarrassment and rage pervasive fear of the world around you and insistence on controlling it naked cynicism and impotently blinkered idealism, with all the economic, political and technological pressures that activate them- Concealed Nations, a new book of poetry by Joel Felix, brings all these to life and suggests how they horribly, oppressively cohere.