$5 (postage paid) 
SPECIAL!Forklift, Ohio #15 plus BIG CRISIS by Nate Pritts $13 (postage paid) |
from BIG CRISIS by Nate Pritts The Fastest Man Alive One note played just right stops me in my tracks, surrounds me with such a pleasing nimbus of white light that I don't even want to move. I'm riveted, rooted, waiting for what comes next while normally, I'm gone before I'm arrived. Normally it takes only a fraction of a second for me to understand what needs doing & to do it. But my speed is my doom, a giant treadmill I seem always upon. Every morning I wake up in the same place I went to sleep; I can never get ahead. I leave my problems in the dust & still they meet me at the finish. The time has come to reconsider my careen; what good comes from bouncing away fast? They say time is a thing that runs out, all my buzz nothing more than a flash. Praise for BIG CRISIS If poetry were a planet without atmosphere and gravity poor, Nate Pritts might be found trekking toward the jagged rim of a smoldering volcano, his space helmet gleaming in the sun. Not even the lead shoes of his humanity could prevent his attempt to leap across the crater in a single bound. Boing! Big Crisis is a Saturday matinee movie marathon, a chapbook full of bazooka toting dinosaurs, inconsolable robots, and broken-hearted superheroes who bury their heads in their uncommon hands, undone by love at last. Pritts' deftly sketched sci-fi scenarios deliver parallel universes complete with spine-tingling adventures and their own peculiar laws of physics. Yet, Pritts keeps his pyrotechnics in perspective and knows that we resemble lost astronauts more than supermen. —William Waltz In Big Crisis, Nate Pritts plumbs the big/small world of the lyric; to his rollicking 'I', the poem becomes part particle collider, part pinball machine. Events happen backwards; love, like mercury, can 'scatter and re-/constitute. Boom!'; and the speaker often finds himself wedged between dimensions, strung up or out on time's prerogatives: "I leave my problems in the dust & still/ they meet me at the finish." Like a little metal ball quarking and quaking, Pritts' volubility and self-sparking energy keep the strophes in motion—"O burgeoning Sun Brain!/bossed around by buoyant beams"—and coming at you live from both the dawn and the end of time. —Joyelle McSweeney |
About the Author
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Nate Pritts was born in Syracuse, NY, in 1974. He has published poems & criticism in many journals, online & print. Previous chapbooks include The Happy Seasons (Swannigan & Wright) & WINTER CONSTELLATIONS (horse less press). Nate has his BS from SUNY Brockport, his MFA from Warren Wilson College & his PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal of poetry, poetics, &c., Nate lives in Natchitoches, LA where he is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. |