$16.00
By Travis Mossotti
Travis Mossotti’s previous collections are About the Dead, Field Study, and Narcissus Americana. Mossotti has been the recipient of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and a Fellowship from the Regional Arts Commission. His fifth collection, Apocryphal Genesis, won the Alma Book award and is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in 2024. He currently serves as a Biodiversity Fellow for the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.
Travis Mossotti’s Racecar Jesus made an impact from the very start with its immediately accessible voice and engaging style. The poems veer unpredictably, rather like a “Buzzfeed” channel, or a high velocity poetic consciousness careening headlong through 21st century Americana. There are lurid ruminations on God and spirituality, quirky, phenomenal imageries that provoke and delight, but there’s equally an eagerness to reach out and connect, to break through the habitual, the mundane, and to become more aware of “the catalogue of human sorrow [we] touch and withdraw from.” Mossotti has mastered the art of the confessional-conversational, combining wit with devastating juxtaposition, like an F1 jet-engine-fuelled Billy Collins on fire. -Jason Eng Hun Lee