Description
Titanfall: Poems by Noah Soltau
ISBN: 978-1-963695-73-1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-74-8 ebook $9.99
August 18, 2026
Shortlisted for the 2024 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
Titanfall explores grief and relationships, becoming and dying. The book navigates questions of identity, mortality, and politics in places tinged by the mythical and theological. In the “Christ-haunted” tradition of Flannery O’Connor’s South, the speaker of the poems guides the reader on a hero’s journey out of Appalachia and into a metaphysical wildland where choices and personalities have cosmic consequences. Grounded in American and German literary traditions and steeped in popular culture and world events, these poems are by turns harrowing, hopeful, and darkly humorous.
Praise for Titanfall: poems by Noah Soltau
Noah Soltau’s Titanfall is a testament to the generative possibility of perspective and sensation. He spins the camera until all is seen, webbing disparate parts until a coherent world emerges, one insistent on memory, history, the here and now, and the human feeling it all.
—Willie Carver Jr., author of Gay Poems for Red States
In Titanfall, Noah Soltau writes, “My attention is not for sale / I am not for sale,” and he proves it by paying astonishing attention to the absurdities of our times. He blurs the political with the personal, while also calling up the ghosts of the past to remind us “that we are neither playthings / nor doomed.”
—Denton Loving, author of Feller
These poems are an invitation to sift meaning from the ceaseless river of consumerism, to seek a relationship with the sacred that transcends the ideology of a cancer cell. May we not refuse this call.
—Clare Welsh, author of Chimeras
Soltau’s poems are acrobatic, experimentally daring, breathless as at certain turning points of revelation: “There is only one story // One day you are going to die.” But not yet, Buddy. There is abundant life here: “Blooming growing enthusiastic expectant.” Treat. Yo. Self.
—Susan O’Dell Underwood, author of Splinter
Sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes beautiful, but always true—the poems of Titanfall are wrought from our world, a little mortal, a little divine, all poetry doing what it’s always been meant to do.
—Wesley Scott McMasters, author of In Which My Lover Tells Me about the Nature of Wild Things
Noah Soltau teaches about art, literature, and society to the mostly willing. He is managing editor of The Red Branch Review. His manuscript, Titanfall, was shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Prize, and recent work appears in Cutleaf, storySouth, and elsewhere. Raised in Chattanooga, educated in the South and Germany, he lives with his wife and two daughters in East Tennessee.
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