Crimsons cover the freeway of the future.
Musical notation enters its decline.
A cloud’s collapse is nothing like a father’s,
empty like the lyric is, cornered
by the operation of its thought.
I go outside rarely, spread my creams
with pink hands sick from washing.
Pinkness is an index to an elsewhere,
a notion inclement like two sticks
which make the weather happen.
The wantonness of drinking has begun.
*****
Michael Martin Shea's debut full-length collection, "The Immanent Fields," is here to stress-test your place in the contemporary. It's here to test your purchasing power. Buy a copy before 7/25 and save over 25%.
"Shea’s is a poetics of velocity—I almost said viscosity and that’s true too. Verb-y and affect-full, the sentence is mad with action (“Green fruits go nuts”; “The bedpan crumbles”; “Piety unspools across the prairies”) and the line swerves hard (“whose roads are these, unpaved, / and so desirous of it—/ balls of prophecy in the nutsack of the real?”). But there is thickness too, an oozy sort of dolor emanating from bodies and objects in a steady state of arousal. The languor of immanence, the lust of simultaneity, thereby the libidinous anti-epiphanic. I am
invigorated!"
—Aditi Machado
"I put my ear up to this rhombus the way I do with the conch. I hear the echo of the quadrilateral; I know the small circulating air is not the ocean. In my mind, the echo of air in the shell provides some momentary comfort. A clean wistfulness. I am similarly arrested within the tessellations of this book’s sticky blab. I, too, want to watch a president die on live TV. I find myself anxiously luxuriating in the spermatozoic seance of Shea’s arrhythmic sequences, wiping the spectral emission from my chest before it dries and the tortures of the day begin, perchance also watching it drip from a hole, an approximate void, our only sense of comfort.
"And elevates a phrase not operatic."
—Ryan Skrabalak
“I do not think the simile is a sufficiently erotic experience,” declares the unstably ironic, shifty, and utterly intense “I,” of this book, early on. This is in a piece called “OPENING ARGUMENTS,” a good title, because this book theorizes what it does, does as a form of theorizing, theorizes, perhaps, as a form of handling a feeling (of bleak amusement? Burnt affection? Lively anguish?) toward the world. What it is theorizing is also at least partly the problem of mediation: “it is impossible to perceive a single image of the object[…]corresponding directly to the object itself” — and despite its ‘erotic insufficiency,’ the simile’s mediating invitation to see one thing through and as another is completely everywhere in The Immanent Fields: a true form of the book’s lively imbrication with and care for the damaged world it attends to. Desire flows “like” municipal waste, the signifier slips “like” a salmon, hope inflates “like” a carcass, vinyl siding flexes “like” belief, a deranged thought pierces “like” the spirit does. The mood is: pharmaceutical. The ideal geometry is of the dishwasher. Heaven is: of polymers. The anchoress has indeed been “forgotten in the walls,” but she’s in there."
—Kai Ihns
"These are poems transmitted from the final phase of lyric consciousness: a voice still singing as it’s dissolved by spectacle, capital, data, desire. Driven by terse, caustic declaratives and a flurry of similes mocking their own existences, Shea’s language machine distributes the body through black-flowered derangements and high-flown philosophical abjections. This feels like an accelerationist poetics, a deeply-textured anti-poetry, an act of psychic vandalism in the moment before we are all unceremoniously subsumed into the borg or the oceans vaporize. A delightful string of literary miscreants came to mind as I read this: Bill Knott, Alan Dugan, William S. Burroughs, Nicanor Parra, and Diogenes, for Lord’s sake. This book sets its teeth into the conceptual absurdities of our glowingly venal drive-thru empire. I would say it doesn’t let go, that it shakes the truth out, or that it transmits its rabidity to the larger social corpus, but this book would mock such predictable rhetorical moves."
—Tim Earley
*****
Michael Martin Shea is a poet, scholar, translator, and editor. His translation of the Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s "Theory of the Voice and Dream" was the winner of the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, New England Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. His research on hemispheric poetry and poetics has appeared in Cultural Dynamics and is forthcoming in Comparative Literature and English Literary History. He is also the co-editor, with Claire Farley, of a special issue of College Literature on “Infrastructural Poetics.”
He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. He also holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi, where he was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. From 2015 to 2020 he was part of the core editorial team of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series, published by Wesleyan University Press. He is currently the NeunerPate/BORSF endowed assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is also an affiliated faculty member with the Program in Latin American Studies.
