Burial Machine

Winner of the Backlash Best Book Award. A poetry and photography collaboration."Life is a burial machine. It digs too much, buries too much, is forced to compress and compact every single impression until the plot explodes. The plot explodes. We start over. "The year lengthens, then constricts." We suffer guilt, hide our little evils, make vows that become poems we can't keep but keep. Insects, not gods, will save us, our friends are in the sand with needles in their arms, we're not really sure what love is because we're probably really just trees, "hands held high, / mythmaking," and polluted water and a frightening mess constantly illuminated and darkened by the ecstatic mind and "tired universe of bones," as the poet Jacob Griffin Hall, whose brain bristles in the ashram of steamy meditation, describes us, embroidering the air with sweat or dew or heroin or all of it-all of it. This is the poetry of everything."

-Larissa Szporluk, author of Virginals

Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Ga. Jacob is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he works as poetry editor of The Missouri Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, New South, The Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review Online, New Orleans Review, and other journals.