All About You

All About You, Chris Nealon’s fifth collection, undercuts its own learned allusiveness—conversing with Virgil, Napoleon, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, and Alice Notley, among others—with nimble wit, savant revisionism, and devotional pathos:

Freedom to be nowhere—not rooted—not tragic—

That’s what you get from the Susquehanna

You love the poem where the ghosts hunch over the reader’s shoulders,

Aching for the material world

Nealon animates “scenes of life” surrounding capital/the Capitol, as both value accumulation and seat of Congress, as well as “the wreck of petrocapital” (Nealon is also the author of The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century [Harvard University Press, 2011]). This fluid trope situates the book:

“Way over yonder in the minor key,” remember how you used to hear it as “the monarchy”?

What a wonderful invention—

And what a beautiful word, yonder

Nealon’s philosophical language play engages the mind, senses, and emotions dialectically, enacting a mimesis of consciousness whose rhetoric includes questions, and—humorously—answers. From “Hi, July”: “I hear so many voices in my head, is it all voices? // It is not.”

Master of the Dickinsonian dash, casual epiphany, and the suturing of contemporary vernacular with the history of Western ideas, Nealon has the gift of rendering life numinous (“Alert— // The barcode shone—“) and not beyond hope: “imagine what a healed people could do.”

Low on electrolytes—you lay down your scythe—

Wasn’t that a lily, you think,

As you drift off to sleep …

writes Nealon, envisioning a “deep-sea turtle that could save us all.”

All About You is a celebratory, intimate study of a “two-part person writing out of incompatible moods,” while “trying to imagine a remediated future” through digressive, dexterous, and enlightening poems. In his “play with duration,” and “etymology of algorithm,” Nealon proves the human—not as capital but soul—and its “rich material” of mortality, to be supreme:

Heavily encased in an MRI—neck brace, ear plugs, a blanket, a shunt

Tears running down my cheeks from the sweet acoustic music they let me choose

I can hardly hear anything—it’s just that the music exists