Eliot Cardinaux: Wandering Subject

Wandering Subject, Eliot Cardinaux's fifth book of poetry released within the span of a year, continues the poet's trajectory through psychic displacement begun in Quiet Labor (2024). Opening with Black Swans, as an elegy to the poet's beginnings as a jazz musician in New York City, and wandering into Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer, which Palmer himself has described as "bold, distinctive, and engaging," the book concludes with Your Song Cast Out on the Wilderness, a resurfacing of the work Cardinaux began in Rope of Sand, the long-form serial poem at the end of The Ocean from Here to Here (2025).

"This book's "orphic noise" is always in tension with its profoundly lyric embodiment of states of person that resist easy categorization or identification. "Differentiation names us," the poet tells us in "Mile Forty-Seven," a pronouncement that is at once core to this book's framing of public life and a resituating of the individual subject as anonymous orphan, passing through with no adequate or sustaining destination.  

Cardinaux has written a fierce and beautiful sequence of "oaths, undone by silence," a book of somber and retrospective wandering that provides readers with "the contested- / ly legible noise of / history" in fragmentary and ludic intervals of attunement."

-Andrew Mossin, Black Trees (2023)

Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, publisher, and translator working at the edges of the lyric and improvised music. He is the author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), six other poetry collections, and numerous chapbooks. He has also appeared on over a dozen albums of original music, beginning with American Thicket from Loyal Label in 2016, featuring Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen, as well as, most recently, Imminence, with percussionist Gary Fieldman (self-released, 2023). He studied jazz and improvisation at Manhattan School of Music and New England Conservatory (BM, 2016), as well as poetry and creative writing at UMass Amherst (MFA, 2022). He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press through which he has published books and chapbooks by such poets as Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, Sarah Menefee, Andrew Mossin, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi, Mark Scroggins, Norman Finkelstein, Denver Butson, and others. He lives in Northampton, MA.

Cover image by Peter Knapp.