Items related to Lithic: A Hyperballad

Lithic: A Hyperballad - Softcover

Nichols, Caleb

 
9781957248721: Lithic: A Hyperballad

Synopsis

Lithic: A Hyperballad (2026, Harbor Editions Laureate Prize Winner) brings together a sequence of poems and a lyric essay that traverses memory, gender, landscape, and language—excavating a self shaped by place, queerness, ecological disquiet, and artistic lineage. As a work of queer ecopoetics rooted in both lyric and experimental inquiry, Lithic interrogates language, and nature, and digs deep to excavate meaning. The result echoes what Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’ a concept rooted in the singer Björk’s 1990’s smash hit ‘Hyperballad’: an object, like a relationship, so large that it is perhaps impossible to really comprehend via the standard set of human senses.

The collection was born on the liminal shores of North Wales and the Central Coast of California—two marginal landscapes threaded through by rivers both visible and buried. Throughout the manuscript, Cymraeg (Welsh) language and etymology resonate against Californian punk, eco-trauma, and the plastic shimmer of contemporary collapse. The collection seems to ask: what if the poem is not the artifact but the excavation itself? That is to say, what if the ‘I’ of the poem is actually a process, and not a subjectivity?

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