On an afternoon in mid-July, the heat index in Forest Park here was hovering in the upper 90s. Members of American Ballet Theater, in town on tour, had just sweated through a company class that the dancer Tyler Maloney likened to “Bikram ballet.” He and his colleagues were on an outdoor stage, and its floor was warming like a griddle.
How to cool the stage before the matinee? How about scattering ice cubes across the surface?
In his latest release, MPH and Other Road Poems, Ed Roberson recounts a motorcycle trip across the United States with two friends in 1970. This journey is taken through the poet’s return to a recovered manuscript previously written in that time, analogous to his own life’s ongoing journey through the Americas’ extended geographies. In these poems, the American West works both as territory and resistant silence.
Marching through the centuries from the croesid to today’s cryptocurrencies, Holt takes us from the thirty-three thousand coins found in the ashy ruins at Pompeii to the thirteen tons of gold and more than thirty million ounces of silver that were recovered from the remains of vaults beneath the World Trade Center after 9/11, along the way looking at a variety of global economic systems and delighting in all the routes a coin can take from mine to mint to market to museum.
more than the men, even. The ones who looked
like I looked. Who called my name in a voice
I could not identify from my own on recordings.