Buffalo Free Rapid Transit

Immerse yourself in a surreal, social poetics in a crisis-plagued Rust Belt city. The sequel to Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Fugue & Strike, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through the city with a love letter to Buffalonians trying to get by. In these poems, a cop cracks Martin Gugino’s head open in front of the world; the wildfires of Ontario smudge the skies above while a home burns below; a white terrorist massacres ten members of Buffalo’s Black community; and a city’s failed response to a blizzard contributes to the deaths of forty-seven people. Hall grapples with Buffalo’s decades of abandonment and its prominence in 2020-2023 as the site of violence and disaster that grabbed national headlines. Through it all, as Hall shows, Buffalonians had to live and cope and work and dream. The long and searching lines of these poems come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of Buffalo’s better future crack open into each other.