Altars of Spine and Fraction: Poems

A debut poetry collection set in and around Louisiana’s fishing village of CocodrieAltars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it. Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by boys raised in the Deep South.

Table of Contents:
Scarlet Harvest The Hurricanes Explain Their Aesthetic When I Think of Firmament Overture Louisiana Birth Toward Likeness: Morning Parable of Baiting Small Bodies Covenant with Knives Parables of Cutting My Swiss Army Tinker Was Confused as I Was at Nine I Could Do It What Now to Praise The Hurricanes Address the Poet The Society Box Epistemology in Retrospect Two for the Boy Drill, 2001 The Story of Bayou DuLarge Novena The Boy Learns Funeral Etiquette He Didn’t So Much Die Voice, at Its Bones, Is Friction Line On Showing You My Hometown for the First Time O Readying Dinner On This Side of Slumber Comment on “Louisiana Birth” Triptych on a Name Knotted Impossibly with Translucent Line Pelican On the Canal Cuplicking What We Are Given and What We Make of It But if You Have Me Last My Theory of Everything Notes

About the Author :
Nicholas Molbert was born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the chapbooks Goodness Gracious and Cocodrie Elegy.

Review :
"We are tethered by the barely visible,” writes Molbert, as much about the fragile coastline being erased by a relentless petrochemical industry as about fishing lines and family bonds. It’s a great mercy that this gifted poet created a fecund estuary of ritual and story out of a disappearing one. He does not exhort or boast revelation but gestures again and again toward that shimmer of saving connection."—Martha Serpas, author of Double Effect: Poems "Like saltwater mixing with the rivers of the gulf, Nicholas Molbert’s Altars of Spine and Fraction blends the myriad complexities of the American South with grace and beauty. These coming-of-age poems mark the borders of innocence and experience in powerful and memorable ways. Each poem arcs into the water, and I am consistently amazed at what Molbert’s poems manage to pull ashore."—Adam Clay, author of Circle Back: Poems "Belief becomes the sinew of place, memory, personhood, and the act of writing poetry. Here, hurricanes not only speak, but instruct the poet on how to break—line, thinking, coast, family, canvas, and the heart. Molbert reminds us, “voice, at its bones, is friction,” as these poems lull and unsettle, conjure and dissipate, transforming to friction-full tides pulling us across the page." —Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones "Altars of Spine and Fraction offers a praise song full of the particulars of a white working class boyhood in Southern Louisiana: hurricanes and rigs, fishing and football, double-wides and Swiss Army knives. In doing so, it offers too the social ecology of a rural landscape changed by fossil fuels and climate crisis, its small towns and social fabric giving way to a rising Gulf. Set against the backdrop of "another lane eaten/by the encroaching coastline," infused with "the funk/of diesel," Molbert's poems also tell the story of a prodigal son wounded by the model of masculinity his father offers. A paean to the homes we leave behind and the homes we go on to make, this book dwells in the place more central to ourselves than the self."—Brian Teare, The Empty Form Goes All The Way To Heaven