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“A Future We Remember is a love letter. From golfing at Duck Creek to roller skating at the Cortland Rink, it roots us in the reflective rumbling thunder of the Midwest. It brilliantly pulls from the landscape reflection and memory, thrusting us between the reality of aging and open possibility of legacy. By crafting characters and settings with care, Noel calls on us to sprint and rebelliously douse ourselves in stormshine. ”
“A Future We Remember places us in the underbelly of the universe’s magic—Circle K, Ohio, Kid Rock—they all bear wonderfully stranged shapes in a world where God carries cigarettes and horses run all winter. Through uprooted memories and aged epiphanies, we see ourselves from a broader perspective, one that accounts for everything above, below, and beyond us. Noel’s poetry is ‘an admission of smallness’ with a remarkable understanding of how smallness brings us closer to truth.”
“Brandon Noel is a machinist, a blue collar worker, a salt of the earth sort of soul - it’s important you know that, because he puts the sort of touch & artesian care into his words you’d expect from someone who makes a living with their hands.
The dirt, the late nights watching out a window, the aching frame taking all the beauty in the short moments so many let pass them by - you really can see & appreciate the parts & labor that went into A Future We Remember.
Not since my late night punker days in my teens have I appreciated breakfast so much, or had so much joy in sharing the memory of a young cutlery thief, as I did while reading this chap.
It’s like the fried appetizers that just landed on your table & you devour them through the pain & steam shooting out your ears - A Future We Remember radiates so much beauty & agony on every page that you can’t help yourself but keep going. ”
Video Series.
A chronicle of my journey into the asphalt and road building industry, and my work as Editor-in-Chief for blue collar magazine Asphalt Contractor.
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All Copies Start Shipping September 30, 2023
Cover Design: Angelo Maneage
The transition into parenthood is wild and exhausting, but it’s full of all the new things your children discover, while giving that newness back to you. The second transition, the one that follows, is trickier. As your children grow up and find their own way, suddenly a realization might hit you. Someday, they will not be there. They will not need their apples sliced. They will not need put to bed any longer.
This collection is an exploration that begins in the past, mid-stride of the first transition, and then makes a transition of its own — remembering the future that the past imagined — reconciling the one remembered and the one lived.