Buffalo Free Rapid Transit

Joe Hall will be joined in conversation by poet Albert Abonado

Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city with a love letter to the people trying to get by within it. These poems move through the years 2020–2023, when one American city became a recurring site of national horror: a police assault caught on camera, a white supremacist massacre, a blizzard that killed forty-seven people while emergency services failed. Hall grapples with decades of abandonment and disinvestment—and with what it means to keep living, coping, working, and dreaming in a place the rest of the country only notices during disaster. The long, searching lines come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of a better future crack open into each other.

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