The Savior of New Netherlands

Mac Oliver’s second book of poems, The Savior of New Netherlands, is a powerful narrative sequence in six chapters in which a temp in the Wall Street district of New York faces the transit strike of December 2005. Oliver creates in this physical setting an experience of a symbolic, historical and even mythical nature. Lower Manhattan reveals layers of creation and destruction. The distances are for walking, the streets are narrower, while at the same time the buildings are formidably enormous. Here we see tension between permanence and change in the architecture as well as in the market as it moves from high to low. Gradually the poems merge into a unified whole that crosses thresholds and creates intersections between the sacred and the profane.

Mac Oliver was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied at Tulane, Reed, The University of Minnesota, and The University of California at Santa Barbara. Mac’s first book of poems, The Mercury Road was published by Leaky Boot Press in 2016.