JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

I’ve long reveled in Cole Swensen‘s brilliant, luminous, and profoundly intro- and extrospective writing, so you can imagine my extreme delight to share Swensen’s advance praise for Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press), my forthcoming collection of poetry:

“These clear musings take an ambling gait, reflecting a mind both pensive and piercing, exuding a calm, yet committed attention to the things of this world. Madera ponders the big questions, such as existence and the Milky Way, but also the small ones—the Oxford comma and invisible pathogens—and all by way of their precise details. There’s a generous exactitude to the whole, which gives our world back to us, once again marvelously strange.”
—Cole Swensen, author of many books, including most recently And And And, Art in Time, On Walking On, and Landscapes on a Train

Delighted to share that Spuyten Duyvil Press will be publishing Nomad Science, my debut poetry collection, in 2026! Big thanks to Tod Thilleman and everyone at Spuyten Duyvil Press!

Here’s a description of the book:

Nomad Science finds John Madera singing the diasporic mind and body in counterpoint with and discordance against exilic lostness, cyber-tech, social media, societies of control, and horror vacui within the data fog. Sonorous, contemplative, formally daring, and deeply critical of the so-called order of things, these poems move fluidly among lyric meditation, political witness, scientific inquiry, intimate sensuality, and shared sanctuary. What emerges is not a thesis but a charged field of perception—poems that think, feel, and refuse to look away.

At its core, Nomad Science explores consciousness under pressure: language breaking and recomposing, systems lagging and glitching, the body and mind registering overload, collapse, and mediated attention. Madera deploys a scientific lexicon—data, entropy, black holes, synapses, systems—not as metaphor alone but as a dynamic tool, situating private experience within planetary, technological, and hyper-objectual scales. The collection’s sinuous sentences, digressions, and sudden lyric compressions formally enact the mental and ethical states they examine. Recurring motifs—loss, birds, rain, riot, machines, disappearance—form a dense internal network, unifying the poems into a single pulsing system.

Politically unflinching, Nomad Science confronts state violence, ecological collapse, surveillance capitalism, and contagion anomie without devolving into slogan or sermon. Yet it is equally a book of care: walking, cooking, loving, imagining, creating, sleeping—acts that do not offer escape but affirm intimacy as a mode of revolt as systems fray. Imbued with wonder and humor, Nomad Science is a luminous meditation on mind and matter, tracking thought and moods as they traverse love and grief, bodies and machines, language and weather, testing, step by step, what holds, what breaks, what throbs and hums.

Big thanks to Ian S. Maloney for his incisive, insightful, and generous review of Nervosities, which was published in Compulsive Reader yesterday!

Here’s an excerpt from Maloney’s review:

The stories in John Madera’s Nervosities take readers on a journey of dislocation, to explore narrative consciousness and the richness of fictional fragmentation. [….] These stories are about diasporas, transformations, fragmentations, and layers of meaning. […] Much of Nervosities seems underpinned by the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly the concept of the rhizome: namely, connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, a-signifying rupture, and openness to asymmetrical structure and reorganization. [….] Numerous times during Nervosities, we see darkly comical and yet philosophically driven insights into the modern world. These narrative voices pass into and through a world of distorted mirrors and dark passages, as they move to other states of being and disassociation from an unpredictable present. Violence and menace often lurk around the corners of the stories. Madera’s prose plays beautifully with acoustics and seems often inspired by poetry. I was moved often by his use of the catalogue during the collection, something I associate with Whitman, and his narrators’ sense of irony, humor, and wit, even as they peer into the dark voids of modern life. [….] Madera’s Nervosities juxtaposes so many layers of narrative and philosophical insight and meaning—it’s certainly not for a novice or casual reader of fiction. But it is a call for intrepid literary travelers who can hear the echoes of Stein, Beckett, Eliot, Whitman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and others across these pages, to rise to its beautiful innovations, its playful use of fragmentation, to better see the chaotic yet meaningful narrative world multiplying under the surface of this rhizomatic text.

Read the rest of the review HERE!

Delighted to share Jeff Bursey’s interview with me about Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press), which was published by 3:AM Magazine today! Big thanks to Jeff—a superb writer in his own right—for the insightful comments and compelling questions about my book! Thanks, too, to Andrew Gallix and the team at 3:AM Magazine for publishing our conversation!

Here’s an excerpt:

Ice melt at the poles, sea level risings, landfill mountains oozing tons of toxicity into coastal waters, yes, and then there are the insect apocalypse and the drought-induced tree die-off, and more and likely worse to come; but there’s also the radical imagination, that vital continuum of possibility, of being and becoming, all of which is to say, while it’s easy to despair, especially considering the world’s human-caused ills and catastrophes, I choose to remain, as best I can, within a zone of celebration and gratitude. Yes, despair is easy: a form of escape that, ironically enough, only returns us to where we already were: stuck in the muck of sterility, of the humdrum, of the unimaginative, uninspired, uninventive. Let us be courageous instead. Let us instead surrender ourselves to the subversive imagination, that vital, marvelous zone of love, creativity, mystery, invention, renewal, joy, community, of great potentiality, and much more besides.

And finally, if you’re an artist, or anyone else who deliberately hurls themselves toward mysteries, uncertainties, instabilities, toward darkness and the seemingly unspeakable, you are, in these trying times—and it’s always trying times; and if you don’t believe me, listen to Donny Hathaway’s impassioned “Tryin’ Times”—likely sometimes, maybe even often swimming in or through a sea of fear, confusion, and/or despondency, whether internal or external. And what I want to say to you is the following: First, and not to sound like the chorus of a cheesy eighties rock song, all we have is each other, and not only is that a lot, it’s everything. And second, you make the thing not because it will be seen, heard, loved, or otherwise appreciated, etc. You make the thing because the thing must be made. You do the thing because it must be done. You say the thing because it must be said. You share the thing because it must be shared. Et cetera. The obstacles to making, doing, saying, sharing, etc., are sometimes maybe even oftentimes enormous. It’s hardest, I think, when those you love, who say they love you, don’t see, hear, love, and/or otherwise appreciate the thing you’ve made, etc. But you made it because it had to be made. You did it because it had to be done. You said it because it had to be said. Your job is done. That is, it’s time to begin again. That is, it’s time to begin making, doing, saying, etc., the next thing that must be made, done, said, etc. And finally, please, please daily take some time to turn off the noise, whether internal or external, and discover what is there in the fertile silence of yourself, which is nothing, that is, emptiness, which is everything, that is, a marvelous place beyond hope and fear, greed and hostility, attachment and aversion, what Thomas Moore calls a “dark luminosity,” which is simply love by another name.

With you through the chaos.

Read the rest of the interview HERE!