Prophecy Mechanic

In his debut poetry collection, "Chad Sokolovsky writes poems that stay inside you long after you’re finished reading them. In Prophecy Mechanic, he explores the industry of memory-making in work that juxtaposes love, music, and art with the casual tyranny of religion, capitalism, and family legacy. Here, human landscapes are revealed click by click as through a View-Master: an oppressive classroom decorated with a teacher’s model military airplanes; the bleak rooms and shag carpets of childhood; a tableau of kids transfixed at the television, absorbing gender roles via Saturday-morning cartoons. Tension between the individual imagination and those structures which seek to constrain and distort is enacted frequently in visions of the post-war industrial; the emotional life of the poems is marked by dissociation and drift. Sokolovsky’s book marks the debut of a steady voice of witness whose poems serve as thoughtful elegies for the hopes of children, lovers, believers, and for all of us living in the shadow of late capitalism.” — Stella Beratlis, author of Alkali Sink