Eli Loves, by Zachary Cole

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Eli Loves is full of desperate characters. A man helps his brother move into an apartment inside a big box store. A NASA fanboy grieves the death of his favorite astronauts, in an alternate history where the Apollo 11 crew perished on the Moon. Lee Harvey Oswald’s family tries to privately grieve as reporters and Texas police watch their every move. An alcoholic father decides to become a traitor to his country during the Cold War, and a washed-up rock star finds salvation before a very small cafe gig. And in the title poem, a young man named Eli, living in an Amish village decides to begin “dressing English”—wearing regular clothes—and explores the outside world for the first time. In Eli Loves you’ll find joy, wonder, despair and perhaps, buried under a pile of hay in an Amish barn, a small sliver of hope. Zachary Cole’s work has previously appeared in the2ndhand and Off the Coast. He lives, works and drinks too much Moxie on the coast of Maine.