Colossus in the Middle of Nowhere, by Lachlan Chu

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Colossus in the Middle of Nowhere is a dedication to the thing and its complement—what the Earth is now, and what it will be when we are cut from it. Something like a blank road runs through these ten poems, breaching the mortal and the celestial, stitching over and over the body, winding towards the nearest exit.

At the end, there is dust and there is an army, a god and the smallest devil, the thing and its complement. This collection, in its brevity, explores with graceful verse the fact of humanity and how we live with it.

"Distinguished by a fierce curiosity and intelligent gaze, the poems in Lachlan Chu’s Colossus in the Middle of Nowhere engage with dystopian themes and existential concerns in searingly original ways. The scope of their allusions is remarkable: literary, military, theological, epistemological, and scientific for starters. Chu’s poems enact the delight of a mind at serious play with language and ideas, making, again and again, something new."

—Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of In a Rind of Light

Lachlan Chu is a rising freshman at Columbia University. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Diode, and the Harvard Advocate. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Acedia Journal.