6"x4"
26 pgs




from Property Line

Honeysuckle
scent like
an open vowel

wrung out
in the rain’s
gloss-

olalia.




Property Line limns the objects of attention anew. This work is paradoxically both stark and rich. In its few lines, it delivers us to a fullness of sight and sound. There's nothing tired or jaded about this writing. "Swallows/whisk the rifts." Word after word surprises.

Rae Armantrout



Don’t let this chapbook’s title fool you: you’re more than welcome here. If, like me, you’re more than bored by American poetry’s recent spate of pointless territorial pissings, Property Line will put you in your rightful place. Joe Strummer once said something like: “If you don’t like Bruce Springsteen, you’re a heartless, pretentious Martian.” Ditto Joe Massey. If you can read this, his world’s yours.

Graham Foust



The poems in Joseph Massey's Property Line are preservative poems, gently elastic in their varied forms, never straying from their author's surehanded ability to capture & illuminate an evolution of motion into image. Massey's is a trusting approach; that is, he trusts that the organizing power of poetry will make the world sensible. In lesser hands, this methodology might be cause for a reader's apostasy. In Massey's hands, however, an enduring & expanding faith in poetry is tested & reaffirmed on every page.

Zach Barocas