DANIEL LASSELL, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Hooligan Leans Over the Edge

This is how the sea made land
thinks the hooligan,
considering how just yesterday
he stood a mountaintop over,
where once a forest stood.
How flame carried everything to ash.

Daniel Lassell on “Hooligan Leans Over the Edge“

When writing a series of poems about toxic masculinity’s impact on climate change, I conceived of a nameless character simply referred to as “the hooligan”—a somewhat feral individual who lives at the farther edges of American society, who in some ways acts as a symbolic representation for the wild and chaotic within all of us. I wrote “Hooligan Leans Over the Edge” as a form of reckoning, a reaching toward. Here, the hooligan stares back at his own culpability in climate change, piecing his behavior together in the constellation of the greater whole. Though a brief poem of only six lines, “Hooligan Leans Over the Edge” is an image of juncture, where all that has changed in the world collides with all that must change in society.

Daniel Lassell is the author of Spit (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021), which won the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and the 2022 Midwest Book Awards Poetry Debut Gold Award, among other recognitions. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Ad Spot (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2021) and The Emptying Earth (Madhouse Press, 2023). Recent poetry can be found in Diode, Arkansas International, EcoTheo, Terrain.org, and Poet Lore. He grew up in Kentucky and currently lives in Indiana. Find him at www.daniel-lassell.com.