Our Human Shores (Black Ocean: 2025) is a dense yet lyrical examination of the limits and imperatives of human agency during the anthropocene. The book’s sprawling, kaleidoscopic mass of untitled poems features cyclical variation in form (left-aligned lines in stanzas, non-aligned lines in space, and justified-aligned prose in blocks) and frequent repetition at multiple levels (phonemes [rhymes], morphemes, words, and phrases). Author Josh Fomon’s poetic focus on continuity and change in the material of language extends his thematic focus on the material of history, and especially on the body as a physical site of dialectic between subject and environment. In his words: “We write the body all wound together, knotted limbs collapsing on sight. We write the history to construct over decimation’s residuum. A marker of where our bodies existed and manipulated time and space. We write this pleasure, this sight” (“[At night, I retreat into anonymity, surround myself with other]” 106). In a crowded field of poets channeling apocalyptic verse, Fomon’s rigorous commitment to a unique poetics offers readers a challenging and distinct sense of vision.
The text’s most immediately legible point of entry is its only dialogue, “[BE I AND BAD BRINES],” a singular departure from the above typology of forms that functions like an actor breaking the fourth wall. Two distinct voices—capitalized left-aligned text and typical right-aligned text—discuss a pervasive “IT.” After providing a working definition of “IT: MORE DAMAGE THAN WE THOUGHT” (67), the text implies that this damage outpaces our preparedness for it to such a degree that the colloquial term “apocalypse” could substitute: “IT. IT PT. 2. / The sequel of apocalypse” (68). Readers are also given broad statements that signal an understanding of this damage as a historical force, at once dialectically linked to human action (“IT IS SHAPING LIFE CHOICES. / Yet life choices shape it” 67) yet beyond the comprehension of any single individual (“YOUR BRAIN CAN’T PROCESS IT” 68). While the voices themselves remain mysterious, their two-page conversation establishes sufficient context and stakes to render urgency genuine, a key challenge faced by literary authors who approach apocalyptic themes. The legible ground created in this text provides readers with durable footholds that complement the book’s lyrical flights into repetition and abstraction.
One of the frequent repeated terms is “shore” or “shores,” which are woven throughout each of the book’s four titled sections (“Our Human Shores,” “The Memory Machine,” “Book of Skeletal Transmissions,” and “The Somnambulist’s Lullaby”). The resulting multiplicity offers readers an emergent puzzle in which definitions, examples, and contexts accumulate and drift over time, evoking the geological processes of deposition and erosion along the coast. As “shore” is deployed repeatedly, it subsumes the duality of human experience as both subject and object. The lived contradiction is captured in one prose poem (“[Hundreds of tethered objects flapping in the wind like only]”), whose speaker describes
Refuse and heartbreak from which we breed creation. Piling on our lives to new lives, creating a simulacrum that we must parse meaning, burgeoning reconciliation with new from old. This maddening shattering. This touching distance. The pile where I emerge and never look back. These human shores. (94)
Repetition of “piling” and “pile” further emphasizes dependence on the accumulation of established conditions—family, community, environment, economy, institutions, foodways, and more—for which Fomon’s term “residuum” serves as a neat shorthand, priming a lens through which to view persistent material reality as a constituent element of historical forces.
Many poems explore accumulation as a force operating in and on human biology—or as the speaker of a short, vertical prose poem with wide margins states, at the level of “your acquired / body” (“[Brackish acid beamed like elec-”], 128). Scientific language often adjoins lyrical gestures, as in the paragraph-broken prose poem, “[This is because I face uncertainty wholly—a glottal reciprocity],” which references “Chemicals entrenched in biospheres, microplastics at every reach. Tehcnofossils of the dam’s breach. We said we were waiting. For what? An impenetrable memory” (76). This also encompasses the creative capacity of the body, as discussed in another, three-page prose poem (“[I would like to repeat myself, no, the martyr I have made in]”), in which “recursive anxiety” (111) is transmuted by the act of creation: “My human shore pours through my glottis. Pulls everything through me, pulls my guts into my hands. It’s pure art” (113). This and other references to the generative power of ideas and artistic freedom form a viable pathway for positive speculation, still grounded in the logic of the whole—something that not all apocalyptic folios manage to achieve.
The body’s impact on perception is another notable theme. In a poem that blends all three forms, “[Find me god in obsolescence, a crooked],” the speaker notes that the sensory system does not consciously register all available information:
The methodical
sounds our body chooses to silence—
its fantastical streamlining of order,
this chaos we have sown.
Stimuli drowning us always (77)
This understanding accords with scientific knowledge about information processing such as the Shannon limit, similar to the idea of bandwidth. In terms of the body, it follows that the total available sensory input of reality is compressed and altered—replaced with a biased image—by the biological processing limits of the human nervous system. By consistently emphasizing embodiment’s role in lived experience, Fomon orients readers towards a shared sense of humanity as a distributed physical presence, intertwined with our surroundings at multiple scales: cells and molecules; particles and waves; food webs and capital markets.
Accumulation at the metaphysical level of ideas, ethics, and affects is another thread woven into the concept of residuum. In a double-spaced text that treads the line between prose and poetry (“[It’s disgusting and imitates trash.]”), the concept of “Succession” is discussed as
The very way we become human,
This pile of ourselves, memories poured sooth.
A cruel cyborg dream of what I remember:
The vertigo of reaching back
into history to place yourself
in a moment. Transgressive, misremembered—
celestial the horizon quaking our human excess. (73)
Returning again to the word “pile,” the narrative highlights the limits of the recursive subject: bound to shared time via the body, yet capable of interior movement into memory’s past and imagination’s future—including the introduction of biased images. Fomon also inflects this understanding with a spiritual sense, of “Prayer in accumulation. Prayer of everything / [ ] we become” (133), as stated by the speaker of “[deprived of that order],” a seven page poem that intersperses prose blocks with non-aligned lineation in space. Fomon’s process of accumulating language is omnivorous, encompassing multiple fields and etymologies as he gestures repeatedly towards history both as object and as trajectory; each reader is left to evaluate the cacophonous surfaces that result according to their own set of priors.
Along with the material constraints of residuum, Fomon dedicates significant space in the book to articulating its complement: the human capacity for agency. Among the most explicit examples is a nine page poem near the end of the book which opens with one of several anaphoric calls to action using the terms “reclamation” or “reclaim”: “Reclamation of the void / Reclamation of the body / Reclamation of the heartstrings detached / Reclamation towards less” (152). After various elaborations, including additional instances of the term “shore,” the poem’s final page begins with an intimate passage on responsibility:
In the morning we’ll reclaim our quiet rage. Our world changing
moments—we don’t get to be comfortable.
We don’t get to decide to step away.
It’s greater than us.
Greater than indecision.
Defining our collective witness
like a tree
stuck sideways—starting
to drop the benevolent
belief, this human reclamation. (159-160)
In the shift from left-aligned lineation in stanzas to non-aligned lineation in space, there is a concomitant shift in voice: from short declarative sentences and end-stopped modifying phrases that directly address reality, to a more lyrical approach including complex sentence structure, figurative language, and use of repetition. Fomon’s accumulation of language includes many such nuanced contrasts; together, they articulate a complex whole—a “collective witness”—which requires some degree of faith from readers, who may resonate with some parts more than others along the way.
In a sense, the necessity of engagement with diversity presented by the book’s structure is another extension of its message. Just as readers seeking to grasp the whole must willingly engage emergent variations in form, humans trying to repair the damage must seek beyond biased images to engage the real lives of other subjects. This reflects the view of selfish action in a one-page stanza, “[My sweet catastrophe—],” whose speaker requests:
Forgive me this original sin—
existing for myself
and forgetting you.
We’re all guilty. We’re
falling from grace
like an infection—
a lover’s dulcitude. (58)
This biblical rendition of connection is buttressed by a view of history as a permanent trajectory into which temporary human lifespans are born. “This fugue / of death makes us refugees— / strangers on our own shores” (26), claims the speaker of a left-aligned poem (“[Just before the tides surge—]”), offering readers a vivid metaphor for how new generations inherit the earth. At its hopeful turns, the book’s language repeatedly urges readers toward concepts of connection, openness, resonance, and harmony with other subjects.
The book articulates several actions humans can take in order to reclaim the damaged residuum of the anthropocene. At the level of the body, one short poem of four couplets (“[I see you polluting your complexion.]”) exhorts readers to “repair our history. / Render the waste from our skin” (72). At the level of wealth and property, a longer poem of 22 couplets (“[It’s a precise mantra,]”) boldly asserts: “we need to make the rich / ashamed of their richness. Acknowledge // capital silhouetted against degradations, / becoming impossible to ignore an ignominious discomfort” (56). These and other signposts continuously point toward material (re)connection—toward reclaiming residuum that has been exploited, neglected, ruptured, poisoned, severed, and more. By reminding readers that “against this future, we tailor / a bespoke love, nooks sewn in / calamity” (“[We measure],” 64), Our Human Shores offers hope in the capacity for human agency, despite the waves of damage now impacting our shared material realities.
