Letters to Nobody — Nathan Hill

Valerian is a dejected, rotten, friendless soul, a student of economics marooned in some concrete university in modern England, where the humanities are not to be taught and where humanity is not to be found. The letter is his method of escape. Part philosophical excursion in the spirit of Rousseau; part poetic ode to higher things; part fiction; part non-fiction; part epistolary; part autobiography, Letters to Nobody is charged with the pain of idealism shackled. It is the desperate invocation of a kind of neo-Romanticism to shield the poet from what he sees to be the stifling economic logic of the age. His ultimate aim is a sense of this world, redemption through retreat.