Author Description

Poetry. SOMEONE'S UTOPIA is about work and the mystery of making. The book's spectral labor is a séance. Readers may hear echoes of Alice Notley and Lorine Niedecker, punctuated by the table-rapping of the invisible hand of capitalism, as they witness the (un)making of the familiar world. Drawing from a wide range of sources--including interviews with contemporary workers and journals from members of a utopian 19th century community--Hall yokes the often unspoken, generational labor of hands and collective dreams to words. Hall connects global histories of migration, laborers losing themselves on conveyor belts, nineteenth century zealots, and poets planting roses in industrial greenhouses to unmask the invisible material and ideological labor that prepares the world for us.