The Night of Electric Bikes

Josh Feit mines decades as a city hall reporter to find metaphors and meaning in bike lanes, zoning code, housing density, and city infrastructure with a set of poems that cherishes urban planning and metro living. It's as if Jane Jacobs and Frank O'Hara made a Surrealist film together. "The wind is made of apartment buildings," he writes in the poem "City Planning Pantoum." And while City planning certainly provides the prompt here (one prize-winning poem details a recent Seattle Dept. of Transportation sidewalk report), this collection translates the NACTO (National Association of City Transportation Officials) lingo of "dwell times" and "linger factors" into verse that contemplates existential moods and aspirations.

About the Author :
A former Seattle Journalist, Josh Feit is currently the speechwriter for Seattle's regional mass transit agency. His first poetry collection, Shops Close Too Early (Cathexis NW Press), was published in 2022. His poetry has also been published in Spillway, Vallum, the Halcyone Literary Review, and Change Seven, among other journals. He was a finalist for the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Poetry Prize and the 2019 Lily Poetry Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2020 Vallum Award for Poetry and won Honorable Mention. You can find him online at www.joshfeitpoetry.com. He lives in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, which has some of the deepest tree canopy in the city, alongside some of Seattle's densest housing. You have it backwards, NIMBYs.

Review :
Josh Feit notes herein that urban planners call the time commuters have to wait for mass transit "dwell time." The Night of Electric Bikes is dwell time well spent, like no matter where you're headed, you're already on your way. As Feit writes, "You have arrived. Your destination is found in others." These poems are sidewalks and streets and cities made of stories, and within them, many more to explore. Take your time, the next one will be along soon. -Roy Christopher, author of Dead Precedents Josh Feit's new collection presents a surrealist vision of our present future: "what you'll hear is nearness walking away." He finds we're already too late to change the story, riding public transportation in urban centers or lingering on sidewalks, while intuiting the wonders multiplying around us: Upstairs neighbors who "have taken up indoor horseback riding." He also reports on the breaking news of the past, like the suicide of Evelyn Francis McHale, whose improbable leap from the Empire State Building in the spring of 1947 seems more heroic and absurd than anything in today's newsfeed. The Night of Electric Bikes forms a maze like a mind dazzled by fleeting images glimpsed from a window on the last train out of town. -Joseph Chaney, Director of Wolfson Press Josh Feit's The Night of Electric Bikes is a swirling collage of city life; not just the literal city of commuters and economics, but also the haunted nocturnal city of myth and history. In its pages we find Kafka's Gregor Samsa on his way to a modern Airbnb. We find tormented lovers and mysterious suicides. We find shimmering clouds of jazz drifting through the unnerving silence of the covid-19 pandemic. Like a seasoned tour-guide peering into the depths of the collective urban psyche, Josh Feit leads us through the labyrinthine streets, revealing something vulnerable, bright, and strange at every turn. -Seth Jani, Seven CirclePress