National Lube

Ryan Skrabalak

'Here is a generous and tender poetic, a new American pastoral full of that particular heartbreaking tenderness of closely perceived things, peopled with loves, with lusts, with public spaces, skunk cabbages and parking lots, motels, interstates, and fraught with a certain unease; what language, or place, can and cannot hold amidst the slippage and the distances. The erotic, the natural, the secular divine and the stuff of a lived life shift come into shifting focus, there is a grace here and an underlying anxiety, that rarefies the grace, Skrabalak writes “I can’t think of anything sadder/ than words. Their frequencies/ and also ,, how delightful // And I know They are intended / as gifts” In this fragmented language we are being shown a new way to hold the whole of perception together, and at the same time maybe let it slip away, intended as, and received as, gifts.' – Cody-Rose Clevidence}