danniel schoonebeek, who still believes in america, maybe only as a terrestrial entity, maybe conceptually too, has been traveling cross-country by train doing readings on a tour in support of his forthcoming book, American Barricade (2014), and writing portraits of each date on the tour, and while my initial impression of schoonebeek when i first met him years ago was ASSHOLE, he is actually very cool and his work is tight as hell, and—despite the fact that if someone says ‘i really care about poetry’ i assume they are full of shit and/or the sender of mass fundraising emails, and also, despite the fact that i don’t really see poetry as one solid entity to wrap your care around—i would say, without hesitation, that schoonebeek really cares about poetry.