About Map of the Hydrogen World:
Map of the Hydrogen World, Steve Halle’s first collection of poems, shuns the so-called divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms and themes while simultaneously developing new ways of knowing and working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, investigations and cuttings, Halle attempts to find his own way through place, history, art, politics, faith and self, mapping particulars as small as an atom and universalities as big as a world.
Praise for Map of the Hydrogen World:
Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, the post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage — these are the weapons in Steve Halle’s arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world’s victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. It comes out shredded, torn into the bandages we need even more than we know.
— Robert Archambeau
Delightful voices and moves play out in the latitudes & longitudes of Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World. Edgy with savvy and brio. It's one wonderful exciting romp.
— Anne Waldman
Edward Teller once shook my hand and told me, “The world is flat, my friend. But it’s the edges that get caught in your eye.” Here, Steve Halle has plucked the edges from the world, Teller’s eye from its roulette wheel, the green electricity from its river. Halle’s poems are hollers in the hallway, smoke between bricks. A very public burning.
— Garin Cycholl
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