Prophecy Mechanic - Paperback

by Chad Sokolovsky (Author)

In his debut poetry collection, "Chad Sokolovsky writes poems that stay inside you long after you're finished reading them. In Prophecy Mechanic, he explores the industry of memory-making in work that juxtaposes love, music, and art with the casual tyranny of religion, capitalism, and family legacy. Here, human landscapes are revealed click by click as through a View-Master: an oppressive classroom decorated with a teacher's model military airplanes; the bleak rooms and shag carpets of childhood; a tableau of kids transfixed at the television, absorbing gender roles via Saturday-morning cartoons. Tension between the individual imagination and those structures which seek to constrain and distort is enacted frequently in visions of the post-war industrial; the emotional life of the poems is marked by dissociation and drift. Sokolovsky's book marks the debut of a steady voice of witness whose poems serve as thoughtful elegies for the hopes of children, lovers, believers, and for all of us living in the shadow of late capitalism." - Stella Beratlis, author of Alkali Sink

Author Biography

Chad Sokolovsky is a Bay Area native and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. His poetry has appeared in Song of the San Joaquin, Penumbra, Quercus Review, More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, among others and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently works as a commodity food buyer and serves as an advisor for the CA department of Agriculture's Organic Product Advisory Committee. He lives in Berkeley, California.