No Longer at this Address: Poems

No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one’s from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man’s attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.

About the Author :
Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.

Review :
The wonderment in an Andrew Hemmert poem spreads far beyond topic or meditation, far beyond moment, era, or epoch, beyond—even—the gravity of our home planet. The joy here is that the poet fixes his lens on everyday experience and chases meaning wherever it takes him, wherever it might be found. From the microscopic to the astral, No Longer at this Address is twinned with a kind, ravishing loneliness and humane beatitude reserved for those artmakers who travel as deeply within as they do from one sentence to the next. A true delight. Hemmert’s No Longer at This Address guides us through the high fire danger of the Anthropocene. His coruscating similes—the ocean ‘rears up like an impossible stallion,’ ‘the laws of America / pass through me like ozone’—unveil his curiosity and wonder. It’s deeply refreshing to encounter poems that invite both dread and delight. This book is disastrously good. How I love those who see rot and rust as beginnings, not ends: the silo gone bad, the tongueless dog or prairie fire ripping past, scattering its ash—all invitations to an actual future. Like Dean Young and Matthew Olzmann, Andrew Hemmert kicks off with a natural fact or minute observation and lands, somehow, at the truths behind our constantly broken heart. I thought my heart might be hardened by now, but these poems held out a hand, offering both a reassuring resignation and—not faith exactly, more—some kind of dogged belief in duckweed, spiderwebs, in the absolute miracle of a single horse’s breath. Through astonishing poems both contemplative and energetic, Hemmert expertly addresses temporality, subjectivity, and situatedness as if what exists in the past may be addressless—without the possibility of being spoken to and without a physical location—and the addresses that matter, these landscapes of light and dark, of ‘brief and terminal returns,’ of a visible world as it is vanishing, only a poem makes possible. He takes some comfort in the idea that the human race may be eliminated, but the universe will go on.