Poetry of Chad Faries > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Chad Faries

Chad Faries is author of The Border Will Be Soon: Meditations on the Other Side, Co-Winner of the 2005 Emergency Press book contest.

In The Border Will Be Soon, Chad Faries leads us through the wars in the former Yugoslavia while dismantling the friction and growth that are born from any major conflict. Faries pits the sentimental against the profane, art against survival, the unfamiliar against home, and love against violence while navigating private and public history through formal stanzas and contemporary—almost futuristic—prose poems. The core events of The Border Will Be Soon unfold with a blend of words that come from witnesses, activists, and perpetrators. One moment, Faries give us a clear picture of the desperation inherent in Nationalism. The next, the coverage of fascists and the divisions they make is replaced by artists surviving the present, and charting the route of a collective future.

Love Poem

Chad Faries

8/14/99

We prepare our cameras by cutting out this special film and fit it over the lenses. We walk outside. Nobody's driving in the streets. The sky is nervous about time. The people here are superstitious. An eclipse after a recent war has to mean some kind of an end. To me it means squinting past the light to see a hole I might adhere to. Stuck to that dark I might be able to escape my tense. That's what god did. He created an amalgam of past, present, and future, which may be the only reason I would ever pray to him.

Now I tell you I am in the moment staring at the sky above Lake Palic. A couple is making love in the water, and they mean it, treading right above a charged bomb stuck in the lake's bed, and among a half eclipsed sun's gray light, I think it's the best thing I've ever seen. The ripples are tracking me down. It's getting darker. Two partisans sit on stone pillars debating, shaking their fingers at each other. Dušanka has a welding mask at her face staring into a lesion of sun. Darker. The young girl with the Sex Pistols t-shirt on her own pillar. And the streetlights are coming on now. The light of the sun is circumcised and all that remains is a brief halo of foreskin. I am on my back near the shore with my legs spread shooting with a wide-angle lens sodomized by light escaping from behind a black moon and you wouldn't believe how I am writing this down.

from The Border Will Be Soon

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