No Longer at This Address

The wonderment in an Andrew Hemmert poem spreads far beyond topic or meditation, far beyond moment, era, or epoch, beyond—even—the gravity of our home planet. The joy here is that the poet fixes his lens on everyday experience and chases meaning wherever it takes him, wherever it might be found. From the microscopic to the astral, No Longer at this Address is twinned with a kind, ravishing loneliness and humane beatitude reserved for those artmakers who travel as deeply within as they do from one sentence to the next. A true delight.

Hemmert’s No Longer at This Address guides us through the high fire danger of the Anthropocene. His coruscating similes—the ocean ‘rears up like an impossible stallion,’ ‘the laws of America / pass through me like ozone’—unveil his curiosity and wonder. It’s deeply refreshing to encounter poems that invite both dread and delight. This book is disastrously good.

How I love those who see rot and rust as beginnings, not ends: the silo gone bad, the tongueless dog or prairie fire ripping past, scattering its ash—all invitations to an actual future. Like Dean Young and Matthew Olzmann, Andrew Hemmert kicks off with a natural fact or minute observation and lands, somehow, at the truths behind our constantly broken heart. I thought my heart might be hardened by now, but these poems held out a hand, offering both a reassuring resignation and—not faith exactly, more—some kind of dogged belief in duckweed, spiderwebs, in the absolute miracle of a single horse’s breath.

Through astonishing poems both contemplative and energetic, Hemmert expertly addresses temporality, subjectivity, and situatedness as if what exists in the past may be addressless—without the possibility of being spoken to and without a physical location—and the addresses that matter, these landscapes of light and dark, of ‘brief and terminal returns,’ of a visible world as it is vanishing, only a poem makes possible.