Scout Faller’s poetry talks through it, in front of you. Classically lyric in that sense, it performs thought “—between / fact—and—stag,” a Bay Area sturm und drang, “— fawning, a lack, a gap,” in another, claiming an essential stake made new for writing now, in this world made of poetry,—“the field,” not open and out there, but “in me.”
The “fawning” gap into which such images enter, “a disassembled locust tree,” in all its designed improbability, locates itself on the glimmering edge of several knowledges in Faller’s work which lap, overlap, reveling in aufheben—“i’m him / ninenomenon,” playing in bed, playing in sound. playing in the folds of theory and complication into the primed and primal: “sheared / off / whole cloth / old feeling.”
It tells me, this procedure, something about the strained nature of holding onto ethical political feeling, of being and producing and trying toip write, laced with both futurity and oblivion, working in the shape and form of other poets who’ve come before us, from June Jordan to Lisa Robertson, just as these poems suggest that the new world is already among us, in “all the things we could do / in a room with some writing.”
Faller’s poems rightly presume the trajectory they move through, and I trust them, especially as their poems compel us to “throw / this/ party / in the pastoral,” at the end and the beginning of the world.
Scout Faller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where they received the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Poetry. They have been nominated for Best New Poets 2026, and received the Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship to attend Poetry Field School. They are rarely bored.