Blessing the Exoskeleton: Poems

by Andrew Hemmert

Overview

Blessing the Exoskeleton is a southerner’s book about Michigan. Written over a two-year period in Kalamazoo, Andrew Hemmert’s poems address climate change, labor, love, and his attempts to live joyfully in a deteriorating world. Though the majority of these poems are narrative, they approach their stories in roundabout and slanted ways. A meditation on job seeking begets a story about the author’s father attempting to catch an owl in a fishing net. A fire down the road from the author’s apartment begets a meditation on telemarketing. Personal histories collide with headlines, resulting in poems that convey everyday experience and seek to praise it. Despite the northern cold and the tyranny of the news, Hemmert develops his own theories for navigating his life, finding beauty in an unfamiliar landscape and climate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822989622
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	75
File size:	746 KB

About the Author

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.

Table of Contents

Contents Of Corridors 1 Driving Theory Phoenix Theory In Remembrance Angels Coming-of-Age Story Clothing Theory Telemarketer Theory Cadaver Theory The Spirit Cocktail Theory Broken Season 2 The Warmth of Toilet Seats in Public Restrooms Childhood Theory Theory Written in the Dust Inside a Secondhand Guitar Film Criticism in the Age of the AR-15 Glory Hole November Theory Alcohol Theory The Smoking Gun Signs and Wonders Reliquary Accidental Prayer Angels Crawdad Theory 3 Kalamazoo The Owl Catcher’s Son Postal Theory Angels Upper Peninsula Light Theory Future Theory World without End Midwestern Gulls Freezing Fog Cathedral Theory Glitter Ode Oranges in Michigan Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Andrew Hemmert’s brilliant Blessing the Exoskeleton finds its pleasures in the margins of collapse. The news, the runaway climate—it’s all an onslaught. And yet, with ‘extinction hovering directly overhead,’ Hemmert writes, ‘we take whatever closeness we can get.’ Hemmert is a poet hellbent on the theory that love is, ultimately, resilient. He proves it again and again with remarkable images and unforgettable lines.

Keith Leonard

Andrew Hemmert’s Blessing the Exoskeleton comes to us from a speaker geographically uprooted from his home for the sake of love. It turns out that here, homesickness is good for poetry, hones the blade of perception, activates and opens exploratory pathways to the self and the body, mines its theories, and intensifies its hungers. ‘Barbeque restaurants should be illegal / or else they should be churches,’ he writes, one of many moments in the book that perform the friction between desire and its counterpart, suppression, where the glory hole cut into the stall divider in a library’s bathroom is covered over with sheet metal, where the speaker finally tells us directly: ‘I don’t know / exactly how to be good.’ And yet, in this light-leaning, love-aligned book of the potential for poetry to bless and renew, legitimate goodness shines.

Diane Seuss

Blessing the Exoskeleton reveals a poet in conversation with the remnants of post-industrial America where scientific theory collides with mythos—a speaker navigating familiar towns and themes stretched from the Upper Peninsula to Florida and all that runs and rusts between. From its rivers and cars to its factories and churches, Hemmert’s poems are hymns to deliverance. They are landmarks on a map of a disappearing world.

Kerry James Evans

There aren’t enough adjectives in the world to do justice to the emotional, psychic, and intellectual depth of Blessing the Exoskeleton. Andrew Hemmert’s poems open like Russian dolls, nestings of startlement, recognition, and illumination; turned toward landscapes both inner and outer, they pulse with tenderness and a fierce, often devastating, precision. How deeply these poems understand our predicament, ‘lost in all this noise so close to home.’ How grateful I am to have been found by them.

author of The Thicket Kasey Jueds

Blessing the Exoskeleton reveals a poet in conversation with the remnants of post-industrial America where scientific theory collides with mythos—a speaker navigating familiar towns and themes stretched from the Upper Peninsula to Florida and all that runs and rusts between. From its rivers and cars to its factories and churches, Hemmert’s poems are hymns to deliverance. They are landmarks on a map of a disappearing world.” —Kerry James Evans, author of Bangalore
 

“Andrew Hemmert’s Blessing the Exoskeleton comes to us from a speaker geographically uprooted from his home for the sake of love. It turns out that here, homesickness is good for poetry, hones the blade of perception, activates and opens exploratory pathways to the self and the body, mines its theories, and intensifies its hungers. ‘Barbeque restaurants should be illegal / or else they should be churches,’ he writes, one of many moments in the book that perform the friction between desire and its counterpart, suppression, where the glory hole cut into the stall divider in a library’s bathroom is covered over with sheet metal, where the speaker finally tells us directly: ‘I don’t know / exactly how to be good.’ And yet, in this light-leaning, love-aligned book of the potential for poetry to bless and renew, legitimate goodness shines.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“Andrew Hemmert’s brilliant Blessing the Exoskeleton finds its pleasures in the margins of collapse. The news, the runaway climate—it’s all an onslaught. And yet, with ‘extinction hovering directly overhead,’ Hemmert writes, ‘we take whatever closeness we can get.’ Hemmert is a poet hellbent on the theory that love is, ultimately, resilient. He proves it again and again with remarkable images and unforgettable lines.” —Keith Leonard, author of Ramshackle Ode

From the Publisher