Glenn Shaheen

Glenn Shaheen is the author of Predatory, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the author of Unchecked Savagery, a chapbook of flash fiction. His poetry has appeared in Subtropics, /nor, Barrelhouse, and Washington Square, among other publications.

Energy Corridor

By Glenn Shaheen

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world’s wealthiest nation. It is easy in America to do nothing and suckle the trickling down of the rich, but these poems urge that we have a community responsibility to alter the way we act. Through varied lenses, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, from Goethe to contemporary electronica, from the 1982 Tylenol Murders to the Stanley Cup, these poems assemble the rhetoric of our cultural landscape into a call to arms. We must change our ways.

Predatory

By Glenn Shaheen

WINNER OF THE 2010 AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE
“Glenn Shaheen is claiming new ground for American poetry. His poems are about the nightmares of information overload, collapsing infrastructure, ubiquitous violence, and other ills of late empire. The subjects are not happy, but Shaheen’s clear vision and crisp—often witty—language offer the pleasures of surprise, discovery, and recognition.”
—Ed Ochester