La Far: Iowa Poetry Prize

How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn’s “rare earths” into the “frosty kits” that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, “literalizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,” we might construct what Wordsworth called a “Common Day,” a communized life partaken of by all.