In Rodrigo Toscano’s The Charm and The Dread, the unraveling of the American Imperium is rendered frontally, through strange adjacencies. Always an astute observer of tectonic shifts in political culture, Toscano plumbs the inter-locking crises that have kicked us into these 2020’s. From formal sonnets to high-speed screeds unspooling syntax, uncanny portraiture to earnest inquiry and appeal to specks of emergent new moralities, Toscano’s ninth collection is a guidestar for our time. The Charm and The Dread jostles political and aesthetic complacency, and invigorates us toward a viable baseline attitude for the new decade. A somatized, personified trajectory as synaesthetically rich as that of tarot or any other hallowed divinatory tool of the ages, The Charm and the Dread brings a naturalized, dreaming body into an awake state in the traumascope of virtualized pandemic humanscape, the place in which we can again breathe, and speak. In these poems we find that the pandemic is “an interiority in search of an externality.” Speaking and breathing these rhapsodic scripts of good-humored yet uncompromised, felt-and-seen engagement of our complete catastrophe, we move from “The crimson yellow of no past // The charcoal pink of no future” through “the squander of recourses // Of leadership” into real encounters with Justice, Revolution, and Flesh. Prescient and unafraid to look, Rodrigo Toscano asks, “What’s the use of any [insurrection] today //If tomorrow and many days to come // Aren’t shaped differently, aren’t lived differently”? Rodrigo Toscano has a vision. He calls it “hemispheric / autarky” and it’s a post-border, post-left, post-bullshit utopia hovering at the edges of everything that can be thought and everything wrong with how we think it. The Charm & The Dread blazes thru the piety, viciousness, prissiness, and irony of Covidian American reality using, among other forms, sonnets that do some of the sickest geopolitical analysis I’ve seen anywhere. There is no real prize, Toscano reminds us, for being, really being what you are—except for being itself, totally. Ariana Reines -- Ariana Reines It isn’t that Right Now is on fire, but that even those up top cough on the noxious smoke of what’s been burning. Red-eyed, tear-streaming, hacking in pissed rhythmics, comes The Charm & The Dread, fresh from a blazing squad car / library / rainforest. Which is to say, ground zero. Brilliantly seething, Toscano is a treble oppositionist scoping the globe, hot wiring sonnets and syllabics into live wires shoved down the throat of capitalist anarcho-tyranny. May its heart burn with this book. Douglas Kearney -- Douglas Kearney Rodrigo Toscano’s previous books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. His poetry has appeared in the anthologies Voices Without Borders, Diasporic Avant Gardes, Imagined Theatres, Dialectical Imaginaries, Earth Bound, and Best American Poetry. He works for the Labor Institute as a national project director, strategizing around issues that involve environmental and labor culture transformation. Originally from San Diego, he now lives in New Orleans, LA. Mundus Let’s have a look at the world in seconds Not by what you’re being told, as I’m being told Let’s do a little tech check, see what’s wonky Locally, yeah, globally, for decades We called for regional dependency And got a sloppy joe of nation state We called for superconductive labor Across cubicles and vibrant valleys Not to mention industrial sink holes “Here goes the project on course in due time Here go the nights of leisure and dreaming” Let’s have a look at the world, day by day They send us an invoice for self-image We transfer currencies of disbelief Eye of the Storm You don’t want a plane crash in your backyard To wake you up to matter, its contours Same for sound, if sound’s grown that dull to you Not to mention smell: no need for plane crash If your imagination’s running dry Or if you need a sense of urgency Or an event to help you spin a tale A plane crash is something that’s way too much Like a voter suppressed fall election Springing everybody into action Unmooring sensuous life in its path And despite the odds being fifty-fifty A serene hole in the sky opening You venture this speck of time to say: no Coconuts You said, “what’s missing here is coconuts” In a handstand on the hood of your car In a crowded shopping mall parking lot In the long summer of twenty twenty    Buck naked, rainbow against a black sky Eyes side to side, straining a focused grin “What’s missing here is coconuts” and then You jumped on the roof of your car, arms wide Pissing while reciting a hundred times “Payroll tax cut now? Pay full sum later? But if we vote you in, sum forgiven?” And as the mall patrol was approaching You slinked into a sort of shark outfit Thrashing off like a senat