Hothead

Hothead is a hot book. Meteoric, mercurial, sexy, and haibun-ghosted, it is a jeremiadic prayer to language (‘each word a partner, each sound a move’), the planet, and the vexed and stalwart ‘self.’ At one point, Cushman’s speaker shares with his consort, an aging laptop he’s christened Patience (‘Patty’), that ‘we need our own genre.’ This singular, arresting poem—part ars poetica, part encyclopedic litany of our imperiled cultural and historical moment, part prodigious lyric roller-coaster ride of the erotics of attention—creates just that. ~Lisa Russ Spaar

Hothead renders the course of a year in a postmodern almanac of the mind, a mind brilliant, fraught, and funny. This is the poetry many have been looking for: Cushman’s Hothead confronts the precariousness of language, yet its freewheeling syntax and sinuous dactyls, graced with haiku, movingly connect body to mind, earth, history, and our companions in this life. ~William Wenthe

Hothead has swallowed me alive! And Cushman’s imaginative verse guides us through a world filled with friendly glasses of Fernet-Branca, torn-out chunks of a Bible, a man typing with his nose, Lewis and Clark, a sentient computer, Buddha, birdsong, and humble, real truths. When I get out, I’ll pass them on as prophecy. ~Nathaniel Perry