Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lost Horizon (UDP 2019) — a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals — and Newcomer (UDP 2014), a lyric personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign. He teaches college composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City. An excerpt of Lost Horizon was published in the Brooklyn Rail.
Taking as a point of departure the retail utopia of the American mallscape — a composite of town square, garden and space station — Lost Horizon spirals out through interstate and rail to touch national parks, local attractions, truck stops, big box stores, strip malls, tattoo parlors, oil rigs. flower shops, and baggage claims. Throughout the incessant movement of the book-length poem, unbroken by stanzas or sections, Farrell privileges observation over judgment and seeks out the crossroads between cultural myth and brand image. The poem speaks from between the mall fountain and the wishing well, the Disney princess and Spenserian queen, the noble hero and the voyeur. Lost Horizon is a poem that catalogs and indexes the collision between fantasies of high and low.
Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lost Horizon (UDP 2019) — a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals — and Newcomer (UDP 2014), a lyric personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign. He teaches college composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City.
