Defining what Gabriel Palacios terms the “vaporpoem,” Lunar Hilton Elegy moves through the artifacts of a boyhood suspended in the neon-noir dusk of 1989—home-taped Video Soul broadcasts, dead-mall architecture, late-night cable access—treating the past not as a home to return to, but as an improvised shelter against the present’s digital weather.
Lunar Hilton Elegy asks what remains of the American myth when its “freshly planted tracts” resolve into blue photonic mist. At once darkly comic and urgently elegiac, Palacios offers a report from the threshold of the still-buffering all-at-once—or, more precisely, a lost-and-found sunbaked cassette of that report, still playing.
“The most surprising aspect of Lunar Hilton Elegy is that it isn’t so much an elegy to a lost world as a mesmeric topology of the world we presently inhabit—an eroded agriscape pitted with debt, where shelter is approximated by bombed-out, de-realized Red Roof Inns and Airbnbs thick with half-mutant Pomeranians. Like a notebook disintegrating in a glyphosate rain, these poems are remarkable for their gentle unwirings and startling preservations, for the intimacies and recognitions Palacios’s speaker attends with his human, de-weaponized eye.”—Joyelle McSweeney, author, Death Styles
"With a gnarled syntax that shines more lucidly with each reread, Palacios delivers one stunning poem after another, and each will worm its way into your subconscious. In mine, forever lives a bleached caterpillar that I found in a parking lot I’ve never been to, where performativity might be properly mourned. This is one of the best collections of poetry I’ve read in the past decade. Put down the remote you’ve been using to try and steer that TVship, because the set has been languishing in the dump all this time. Tune into Palacios’s songs instead.”—Sara Sams, author, Atom City
