Boulevard

By Nathanael O'Reilly

Boulevard, a poetic journey forged amid the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic, encapsulates a year of the poet's life confined to working from home due to travel restrictions to Australia and Ireland, his cherished homelands.

Comprising 76 sections, this collection beckons readers into a nuanced exploration of the extr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Downingfield Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9780645231861

Nathanael O'Reilly

Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O'Reilly teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His poetry collections include Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Downingfield Press, 2024), Landmarks (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024), Dear Nostalgia (above/ground press, 2023), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE (above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017). His work appears in 125 journals and anthologies published in 15 countries, including Cordite Poetry Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Mascara Literary Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Southword: New International Writing, Trasna, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.

Book preview

BOULEVARD

Nathanael O'Reilly

Praise for the Author and Work

Nathanael O’Reilly’s Boulevard achieves a poet’s holy mission to elevate and preserve the times one lives in with starkly rich, elegant, Hopper-like vignettes unfolding over time in the micro-view outside his window of one stretch of an American street while hunkering down during the initial period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The everyday is made new and unusual; the seemingly mundane, extraordinary. O’Reilly reminds us that poetry is the alchemy that give us light, even from the darkest moments in the human experience.

Matt Hohner, author of Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House, 2018)

With irrepressible ingenuity, Nathanael O’Reilly employs the poem as fragment to explore his neighbourhood’s resilience in the jittery and ludic rhythm of life during the pandemic. Highly attentive and closely focused, Boulevard is a superbly crafted and questing poeticization of the hyperlocal—exploring the daily and seasonal tempi of the suburban and the quotidian. In haunting and entropic turns, home and identity are newly inflected as both the experience of an ‘exile trapped in the wrong hemisphere’ and the observations of an engaged outsider; an eloquent COVID flaneur who views life as simultaneously connected and detached, enduring and fleeting. Boulevard is razor sharp; it is testimony, celebration and elegy.

Cassandra Atherton, poet and critic, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

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