Up Ahead

Abstract

Up Ahead documents the ways movement and speed inform, permit, and distort a speaker’s perception of narratives assumed both individually and collectively. The collection’s skeletal metaphor—the American interstate as vehicle for American opportunism and exceptionalism—dramatizes the tension (or lack thereof) in reckoning with the contradictions and fictions inherent in being a traveler, a husband, and an American. Many of the poems in Up Ahead pull real documents surrounding the planning, lobbying, and building of the interstate system (the largest human construction wonder in history) to parallel language found in the domestication of violence, and the absolution of individual guilt.