AMID THE RECENT POSTS LAYING out the parameters of the online lit universe, it’s reasonable to ask the question, but what of the writing? Beyond the small ecosystem of poems published and retweeted in their small circle, how much of a there is there? Noam Hessler’s Officeparks (2025, Farthest Heaven) indicates that the answer may be: quite a lot. Poems in this debut collection previously appeared in online literary magazines such as Apocalypse Confidential, Bruiser, Do Not Submit, and even The Crank Mag, the ultimate marker of online lit in all record of its existence having disappeared from the web. Crank’s call for submissions when extant included the note “Most kinds of poetry will be considered, though poets who don’t engage with tradition are less likely to find a home here,” and Hessler both does and does not fit that edict.

[continued below]

The form and language of their writing has a startling freshness, and yet converses with and looks back to tradition as well, whether in the Joycean echo of the final line of Fifteen Dollars Marriage Pome (“Yes oh yes I do I do I do”), in the translation of Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov or tribute to Russian Symbolist writer Valery Bryusov, or in the consistent attraction to Greek myth running through the work, as in In My Body: I’m the Minotaur, envisioning “A labyrinth as intestines” where “the bull roams choleric in the pasture”. Hessler moves forward with the energy of a young and hungry artist, but as most great writers do, draws on the past to power these explorations, picking and choosing as a wide-ranging curiosity dictates.

^{Officeparks, 2025
____}

Beautifully designed and illustrated with their own distinctively fanciful line drawings, Officeparks ranges across America in nimble leaps and bounds, touching upon the collection at Dia: Beacon (their poem on Richard Serra is a personal favorite) and the Pacific Northwest (a particularly vivid poem of the same title piles up one striking image after another), the world of young friends sleeping in cars somewhere out near Omaha, and always drawing away from the tidiness of civilization and into the wilds and deserts beyond. Hessler’s America is one populated by moose (the titular King of Mudland Road), rich in bear, buffalo and musk deer, in catamounts (twice), in birds (as in The Conqueror (Bluejay’s Departure) and For the Golden Eagle w/Clipped Wings in VINS Nature Center). Hessler probes the spaces sprawling between our nation’s office parks, which when depicted turn out to be less the recognizable workaday world of capital and more a fever dream of trashgrass odor and newtbites. Their writing is full of imagining what it might be like to be in an altered state of consciousness, of the poetic worlds beyond our ken which the rest of us ignore.

Much is made of slop these days, but Hessler could be said to be interested in antislop, or perhaps with vitalslop—that is, with novel compound words a la Dos Passos and his inheritors, with the dark viscera that powers life. Reading a single poem in this collection can take one back in time, but more often it takes one into an alien, densely described land that demands full reader attention as the language nimbly skips between striking formulations and coinages. Newly graduated and out of the gates with vengeance, Hessler is coming to take their place in the pantheon of Vassar College poetry alums, jockeying to replace Mary Oliver, whose first-person nature poems run counter to their own instincts around mystery; both are concerned with it, but in very different ways, as if they are two opposing high priests. Yet while the flights of fancy duly wow the reader, it’s the dedicated poems—to Hessler’s mother, father, and friends—that have an extra resonance, infused with a personal feeling that makes them touchingly poignant. By contrast, the screamo lyrics in the collection’s second half are more formal experiment than anything else, and the same could perhaps be said of the book’s final piece, a sort of play in verse entitled The Burning of Wyndam County Parish, 1960, though the impulse to turn to the past elsewhere serves the poet well.

Hessler might best be described as endlessly voracious; to read this collection is to confront one’s own knowledge gaps, as the dense allusions pile up, and their productivity since this debut was published has seen Hessler generating poem after poem in modes even more diverse than the mainly free verse included here. Anyone reading the writing collected here will be waiting eagerly to follow what lies ahead, whether in the deep sea, the twilight past, or in the nation’s forests, parking lots and highways. •

Officeparks is available for purchase through Farthest Heaven.

Noam Hessler is an American poet. They live in New York and Vermont.

Twitter

Nora Rawn works in subrights in publishing and lives in Brooklyn. She has had pieces published or forthcoming in Dodo Eraser, Dreck Lit, Be About It Press, Burning House, Electric Pink, Tap Into Poetry, Burial Magazine, Some Words, and Michigan City Review of Books.

Twitter