Motion Detector by Drew Gardner

Drew Gardner composes perfectly ironic music for those “alive without warning” in menacing times. In Motion Detector we find endlessly inventive, charmingly ruminating verse. “Setting things right / takes the example of a unifying contradiction.” Where personhood meets the ontological, at the intersection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and “Personism,” Gardner's early poems are timeless in the way poetry is still the news, made intrinsically more palatable by dazzling wit and improvisational “… flesh of rehearsing.

—Laynie Browne


Motion Detector by Drew Gardner is never stasis by mundane detour but teems beyond seismic alignment with its possibility sans categorical stasis. It never ruminates with imploded mockery of itself yet is always sustained by kinetic by original origin. 

—Will Alexander


“The voice in my head is a poor strategist,” but with Motion Detector it’s found a new plan for “escaping something that is going to break.” Drew Gardner sounds the 20th-century fin de siècle in all its pulsing waveforms: echo, whimper, doppler, alarm, decay. It’s poet as “resonating chamber, absorbed by a mechanism of power,” yet armed with the “disciplined kindness” to defuse it. Keyed to the social, his poems match pitch with the cosmic “and bring the doubt your shadow / into the circle of love.” 

—Rodney Koeneke


Drew Gardner’s books include Sugar Pill (Krupskaya, 2002), Petroleum Hat (Roof, 2005), Chomp Away (Combo, 2010), Defender (Edge, 2018), and Ingenious Pleasures: An Anthology of Punk, Trash, and Camp in Twentieth-Century Poetry(University of New Mexico Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Gardner lives in New York City.


Book Information:

· Paperback: 90 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-494-9

$18