The Trappings and the Suits of Woe – S.G. Mallett
February 13, 2026
On December 31, 2024, Expat Press published two hundred and eleven of Conor Hultman’s poems to its site here and I am holding DOE by Conor Hultman through Cloak open in my lap and I can not find “Three Rivers” in Pennsylvania in DOE; I can not find “Heckscher State Park” in New York in DOE; I can not find “Naples Terrace” in DOE; I am scrolling through the two hundred and eleven; I do not remember reading “Sheep Ln” in DOE; I do not remember reading “Wiltwyck Cemetery” in DOE. Here is “Grand Island” by Conor Hultman which first appeared in Expat Press on December 31, 2024, from which I quote in full:
tshirt
belt
and you can read DOE‘s blurbs here on the Cloak site as they are not on the back cover nor on any page of DOE, and though all the heavy hitters weighing in summarise DOE‘s premise and conceit and motif and aim and scope and corpus perfectly well or as well as any summary can stand for what gets summarised, the book-object of DOE is a more effective version of itself for not housing them. Logan Berry, Kate Durbin, Gwen Hilton, Robert Fitterman, James Nulick, and Manuel Marrero all verb DOE better than anyone else could but for that DOE‘s power is precisely its cataphaticism, not its apophaticism. DOE‘s power is its clinicism. Its sober accounting. DOE is centerless, shaped by the flatline of time. DOE is not its urgency. DOE is about deaths, not Death.
The fifty cantos of DOE array three in DE, eighteen in PA, thirty-three in NJ, eighteen in GA, two in CT, five in MA, fifty-three in MD, three in SC, one in NH, eight in VA, fifty-two in NY, ten in NC, two in RI, one in VT, ten in KY, five in TN, eighteen in OH, six in LA, twelve in IN, eleven in MS, nineteen in IL, twelve in AL, two in ME, seven in MO, seven in AR, eighteen in MI, eighty in FL, forty-one in TX, one in IA, eight in WI, eighty-eight in CA, one in MN, four in OR, two in KS, three in WV, fourteen in NV, one in NE, five in CO, one in ND, one in SD, one in MT, nine in WA, one in ID, one in WY, two in UT, one in OK, eight in NM, twenty-nine in AZ, three in AK, two in HI, in that order, and in variable detail. The longest poem is four pages, the shortest poem is one line, and the most poems on one page is three. DOE assumes as much physical room on my shelf as Godel, Escher, Bach.
A poem like “Belle Chase” seems to speak for the project as whole, where “the decedent cited the writing of emile durkheim” and “he also added this aside to the authorites // You are bound to preserve domestic peace and order. If you pursue who I / was (and spend hundreds of dollars) you will accomplish little. There / are no legal consequences of my death or nay kind of entaglements. / All that can happen is that you will shatter the domestic peace and / order of two innocent lives. Do not deprive them of the hope that / their “missing” son will return. Let me be, let it be as I wasn’t ever / here. Simply cremate me as John Doe” whereas a poem like “OCEAN SPRINGS (I)” from which I quote in full:
blue jeans
a bible
navigates the certain sort of solemn minimalism DOE takes as fact. Logan Berry gets it when he blurbs DOE as part cartography of evil, the territory as cataphatized for the death it contains as for the death it itself is, as if each location’s name were the summation of the dearly departed. The words in DOE are what was found on the victims. The victims are real. DOE was less written than culled. DOE has already been cribbed here.
DOE‘s energy is its facticity. Like the stage magician, the poet, and the poet’s work, is best when it has been practiced offstage. We want to know they’ve done this before, before we lie beneath the saw in their hand. This is usually the blade’s edge between what is meant by the experimental and the conceptual. That which is experimental is a thrill to the driver and the driven. The conceptual is the realized experiment. DOE is conceptual in that it is coherent and cohesive. And unlike the stage magician, the poet draws on what is. Little more than kin and less than kind to what McSweeney & Göransson name the necropastoral, a morbidity more artful than clinical, things become their constraints, or can. Hear Eunoia by Christian Bök read to you, and how it is a small topography, a horizontal section of something realised, the cardinality of some real thing. A.E. Stallings riddled her translation of The Nature of Things with anachronisms, substituting Lucretius’s images of the then for images of the now, and a death is what one leaves behind. What one wears says who they are, and what one owns one owes to some future version of themselves to indurate an image of their self, a Francis Flaherty’s Cadillac Man rather than Andrew Scott’s Hamlet in fruit of the loom. To read Hamlet’s melancholy is to miss what makes Hamlet Hamlet. Hamlet is more than those who play him, sure, but less than some platonic extension, less than what Bloom says Melville says about a demiurge’s anarch hand tearing the human integral into recomposing atoms of the hermetic androgyne, and more than data in Everyman’s Library: he’s just a boy played by a bleached blond Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson is saying Hamlet’s lines. His eyes are doing the heavy lifting. And when Hamlet datamines Gertrude’s “seems” and lands like Apollo’s crow on the trappings and the suits of woe, the line is spoken about his father past his mother to the man his mother took to husband. One can hear sincerity in Claudius’s response, that there is a story in which Claudius could play Hamlet’s father on the condition that, since to grieve is a fault against the dead, “this unprevailing woe,” Hamlet forgets. But it is not a phase, Mom. You can never forget death.