“Someone ‘s Utopia is about work and the mystery of making. The book’s spectral labor is a séance. Readers may hear echoes of Alice Notley and Lorine Niedecker, punctuated by the table-rapping of the invisible hand of capitalism, as they witness the (un)making of the familiar world. Drawing from a wide range of sources—including interviews with contemporary workers and journals from members of a utopian 19th century community—Hall yokes the often unspoken, generational labor of hands and collective dreams to words. Hall connects global histories of migration, laborers losing themselves on conveyor belts, nineteenth-century zealots, and poets planting roses in industrial greenhouses to unmask the invisible material and ideological labor that prepares the world for us.”
—Emily Anderson

“Someone ‘s Utopia is stricken testimony from the Anthropocene, transcribed in the evaporating zero of stolen pensions, on the yellowing grass of Superfund sites. Borrowing from Studs Terkel’s elegies, Hayden Carruth’s astringent indictments, and the eco-polyphony of Brenda Hillman, these poems offer a bouquet of ‘Vicodin roses,’ pairing medieval cyphers with familial trauma, buttermilk with ammonia, and legal codicils with carcinoma. ‘The hour is coming,’ Hall tells us. ‘It has come.’”
—Simeon Berry