About the Book:

At the crux of The Amputation Artist Michael Broek escorts Walt Whitman on a poetic homage throughout northern Jersey and NYC, commenting on architecture, culture, identity to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These poems echo Williams’ “no idea but in things” and Olson’s “projective verse.” I keep returning to Nathaniel Mackey’s “Andoumboulou,” and how the disfigured can mirror language tangential to the body whole. Through the amputee Broek examines the body electric, and these poems sing, sing a body shaped by (US). ~ Randall Horton is the author of Pitch Dark Anarchy