Panic Attack, USA

Poetry. "Nate Slawson's debut collection, PANIC ATTACK, USA, is a brass-knuckled love letter to a lost world. Meet the Cerberus of Slawson's vision: spinal cords & grizzly bears, lost cities & body bags, bloodstains of dreams & birthday parties, yellowjackets & rattlesnakes, vampires & movie theaters, amens & fuck-offs, Heather Locklear & Superchunk, unidentifiable bodies of moonlight, midwestern topography & tommy guns, teeth & knee-caps, belt buckles & wanderlust. And there is more & more in the fine carousel of his brilliant wit & tenderness. Finally, a voice emerges to translate the wildfire of loneliness and memory. Each of these poems is a muscle—reflexive & close to the bone where America waits to be broken & re-cast. I trust Nate Slawson's poems to name lightning."—Rachel Eliza Griffiths

"Thank the poetry gods that there is someone like Nate Slawson in this otherwise neutered world. Thank the poetry gods that Nate Slawson writes with a hard-on. When I picture in my head what the speakers in these poems look like, this is what I come up with: a man naked on a pogo stick hopping down the street. This is a man, in other words, who lets everything hang out. This is a man who is not afraid or ashamed to tell it like is. Christ if I don't wish there were more people like this, and especially more poets like this."—from the foreword by Peter Markus