Amerikan Chernobyl

When Virgil Suarez enters the world, poetry, art, and photography about Chernobyl, and the decline of America gathers the broken and scattered relics of an unhinged nightmare. Amerikan Chernobyl is revealed, it is in shattered beauty and troubled inspiration where we find ourselves humbled and speechless. What Suarez reveals to us, gasping beneath the surface of calamity, is truth. There is no deception. There is no masquerade. Instead we are led already weakened to the horror. But unlike other works of condemnation, we are never hidden from the true secret paradise that drives us on, permits us to transcend the apocalypse. Suarez lifts us beyond defeat, for he is possessed by trembling innocence, gorgeous and brutal respect. This is a book of bloody fantasy that comes from living flesh. We see it all, we reject it all, and embrace the possibility that somewhere in grief is revelation. Everything we want and need lives in art. Suarez delivers in truth and trust and poetry. We will bow in respect, whisper, cry, and survive, if we cling to his creative possibility. Long live exaltation. Witness Amerikan Chernobyl.

--Michael Rothenberg, co-founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and author of the most recent collections In Memory of a Banyan Tree, Drawing the Shade, and I Murdered Elvis.

Poetry, photographs and mixed media art capture the process by which a country through excessive consumerism and greed succumbs to neglect, decay, detritus, and the decomposition of all man-made things. The planet is in peril and humanity is slow to act. Humankind eventually will perish and the earth will recalibrate itself. Even in the face of some cataclysmic and or nuclear disaster (too many close calls on the record already) the planet will survive and morph into something new. More than ever the plight of the underdog, the inaudible voices that perish daily trying to survive while doing menial, poorly paid work need to be heard. They serve as chronicle and witness to the mundane and daily grind of lives being worn down to nothing.

Virgil Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. He has been taking photographs on the road for the last three decades. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of the Southeast, photographing disappearing urban and rural landscapes. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING'S LAST MOLT, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020. Mr. Suarez makes his home in Florida.