Lost & Free #43

Lost & Free #43 is a year-long ledger of becoming-an unflinching record of a life lived in motion, in rupture, in desire, and in the quiet spaces between. Spanning the volatile arc of Darl Andrew Packard's 43rd year from birthday to birthday, these poems chart the territory where personal history, political tremors, bodily hauntings, and the daily grind of existence collide.

Across fragments, incantations, sketches, and full-throated confessions, Packard tracks a mind negotiating its own edges. Dreams fold into dreams. Violence blooms alongside tenderness. A single raindrop becomes a universe of potential; a blank canvas becomes a threat; a lemon press becomes a cosmic joke. Here are poems that travel from election-night streets to empty motel rooms, from childhood summers to Nevada highways at midnight, from South Lee balconies to the inner chambers of memory and sleep.

Threaded through the collection is the restless tension between being lost and being free- echoing through scenes of upheaval, intimacy, exhaustion, political fury, and hard-won clarity. These pieces wrestle with identity and inheritance, with the heaviness of language and the necessity of using it. They pulse with humor, grit, musicality, and a willingness to turn the self inside out.

Lost & Free #43 stands as a vivid snapshot of a year lived under pressure and possibility-a testament to the ways we break, rebuild, speak, and keep moving. It is a book for anyone who has ever felt adrift, and for anyone who has ever found unexpected freedom in the drift itself.