YOU ARE A CAROUSEL
I wish you’d squeeze my hand
so you could feel how I
beatbox for you it’s romantic
I swear like tornadoes &
pink champagne how they is
all a cacophony of oysters
funneled down the throat
accordion belly & tilt-a-whirl
the lawns are so brown here
they make me wanna file off
my fingerprints the neighbors
are windows giant flatscreen
TVs & I wave to everyone
like I wanna ride them too.
THE DRUGSTORE IS A VOLCANO
My pills are blackberry kissing.
My pills are tiny fish exploding
in the morning.
It’s 1989 again every where
I look. My name is Bank Teller’s
Red Button & I am happy
for lightning bugs & De La Soul
so happy my boundless affection
is not lost it’s all right my boundless
affection is only bleeding.
I wish your knuckles.
I wish your alligator teeth
your barbed wire love a universe
where stars explode into congregations
of birds.
I wish your fists & exploding birds
& bruises on my lungs.
I wish your goodbye hand
was a derringer muzzled
into my gut.
ODE TO YOUR COOL HANDS
I be your horse
to whip & to hold
not corps
not busted ankle
bone & down
my throat you
can plug every
dime every
quarter so I be
your parking meter
& you be my
pipe cutting tool.
AN ESSAY ABOUT BLACK KEYS
at the movies I play
the same character
every time so you will
always recognize me
I would like you to believe
I am not acting
I would like you
to believe my hands
do not shake
my arms do not go numb
my body is the house
you grew up in
& the way my face gets
when I look at you
sometimes is difficult
practice not unlike
drawing maps of your
circulatory system or
making you the perfect
grilled cheese sandwich
which is one more thing
I’d rather be doing
than talking to you
on the telephone or
writing you this letter
on my old Casiotone.
Nate Slawson’s debut collection, Panic Attack, USA, is a brass-knuckled love letter to a lost world. Meet the Cerberus of Slawson’s vision: spinal cords & grizzly bears, lost cities & body bags, bloodstains of dreams & birthday parties, yellowjackets & rattlesnakes, vampires & movie theaters, amens & fuck-offs, Heather Locklear & Superchunk, unidentifiable bodies of moonlight, midwestern topography & tommy guns, teeth & knee-caps, belt buckles & wanderlust. And there is more & more in the fine carousel of his brilliant wit & tenderness. Finally, a voice emerges to translate the wildfire of loneliness and memory. Each of these poems is a muscle — reflexive & close to the bone where America waits to be broken & re-cast. I trust Nate Slawson’s poems to name lightning.
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Mule & Pear
This is the book you’ve been waiting for: the book you secretly wish the super-intense guy who sat behind you in 10th grade English had left in your locker. Nate Slawson has a crush on the whole world and Panic Attack, USA is his proffered mix-tape—a whirlwind tour of desire’s punk rock curio cabinet, a transmogrification that spins cotton candy out of strychnine, a balls-out love punch that will come crashing through your bedroom window with a boom-box full of flowers to set fire to your jaded little 21st Century heart.
—Karyna McGlynn
Thank the poetry gods that there is someone like Nate Slawson in this otherwise neutered world. Thank the poetry gods that Nate Slawson writes with a hard-on. When I picture in my head what the speakers in these poems look like, this is what I come up with: a man naked on a pogo stick hopping down the street. This is a man, in other words, who lets everything hang out. This is a man who is not afraid or ashamed to tell it like is. Christ if I don’t wish there were more people like this, and especially more poets like this.
— from the foreword by Peter Markus
These poems are as obsessively inventive as a stalker, as hurt as a pony with a knife in its soul, as surprising as a forest fire in your mouth, as fixated on actual love and the notion of love and the loss of love as I hope never to be, though if I am, this will be the book I should have written, in the future when it's not possible to write this book because Nate Slawson did, when I will turn to it to understand how I should have screamed and lauded when I had the chance.
— Bob Hicok
There’s a gigantic, rollicking heart inside Nate Slawson’s Panic Attack, USA. It’s a heart that “wants to play bomb shelter / in your VW hatchback.” It caterwauls. It supernovas. It’s “hunched over the encyclopedia attempting to read our futures.” From appearances by musicians June Carter, De La Soul, Jaw Breaker and Otis Redding to the swerving leaps of “when I cup my / hand to your chest, / be like thunderous / rain, like wasps in / a coffee can, & thou / nettles & dry river- / bed, thou sermon of fire sister,” Slawson’s debut thrums with music. These brilliantly alive poems punch you right in the teeth, and then, messily, open-mouthed, they tenderly kiss your bloody lips. I love this book.
— Alex Lemon, author of Happy: A Memoir and Fancy Beasts
Nate Slawson is a visionary force in a new generation of younger, innovative poets. His work blends personal discovery with magical dimensions of the unexpected and the revelatory. In reading Panic Attack, USA, his experiences become my own and they transcend beyond their power on the page to welcome others. This means an important poet is living a life of poetry through fresh uses of language—seeing it, sharing it, and making the reader want more.
— Ray Gonzalez
But what if it turns out we never belonged/can we go back in time to when/you were a wheat field & I was/a meadowlark in the thresher/of your delicate teeth? I'm convinced that Nate Slawson knows better than anyone the particular sorrowing and celebration of throwing a parade in the forest we built with our teeth—by keg of birds by new rabbit's foot by very river by sleeping pill heart of afternoon—and it is a brilliant relief to me that he has named these urgencies, has turned them into poems that are so tender and immense.
— Allison Titus, author of Sum of Every Lost Ship
Nate Slawson's Panic Attack, USA invents new ways to astonish and excite, to probe the core of desire, love, and loss in ways that are unexpected and dazzling. The language of these remarkable poems is taut, sinewy, and seductive. These poems are irresistible, and impossible not to love. They will circle your house at 3:00 am. They will peer into your windows, and slip notes under your door begging you to come back. You will, again and again.
— Patty Paine, editor of diode
One of the problems with getting older is that everyone starts to act like they have it all figured out, with their big brains & their emotions in check. Which is why I'd rather hang out with Nate Slawson, an adult human being but with the rare courage necessary to own his raw & untamable feelings, to speak his very tender soul into words instead of hiding behind poses, whose heart is always in danger of shattering not because it is tiny or delicate but because it is huge & everywhere.
— Nate Pritts, editor of H_NGM_N
