Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of "Silver Springs," Frank Ocean lyrics staking...
Shirley Temple tap dancing at the Kiwanis Club, Stevie Nicks glaring at Lindsey Buckingham during a live version of "Silver Springs," Frank Ocean lyrics staking new territory on the page: this is a taste of the cultural landscape sampled in Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era. Chad Bennett casually combines icons of the way we live now--GIFs, smartphones, YouTube--with a classical lover's lament. The result is certainly a deeply personal account of loss, but more critically, a dismantling of an American history of queerness. "This is our sorrow. Once it seemed theirs, but now it's ours. They still inhabit it, yet we say it's ours." All at once cerebral, physical, personal, and communal, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era constructs a future worth celebrating.
Chad Bennett's poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Volta, and elsewhere. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, a study of twentieth century poetry and the queer art of gossip. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
