Counter Voice, by Maxwell Rabb

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Outside, a supercell looms over endless fields. Inside, the living room scalds to the touch. Counter Voice unfolds as a work of pastoral paranoia, where the home and its surrounding landscape collapse into a single psychological terrain. Again and again, the poems travel across treacherous landscapes, each scene charged with a growing sense of fear and anticipation.

The tension throughout these poems draws on the idea of bathos: an eventual anticlimax, where the sublime suddenly gives way to the absurd. In these moments, when the world is destabilized, Counter Voice returns to the act of writing. Writing becomes a site where thought appears to arrive from elsewhere, as if spoken back to the poet. This phenomenon echoes the “counter voice,” a term explicitly mentioned by Hannah Weiner in her 1994 essay “Silent Teacher” to describe a form of clairvoyant feedback that emerges during the act of writing. A voice that reshapes the poem as it unfolds.

“When I awoke, I did not have the burst of electricity. My mind, however, never shut up talking to me, and as I would think of something it would add a useless phrase, such as ‘for the time being’ or ‘now.’”

–Hannah Weiner

Maxwell Rabb lives in New York, leaving parts of his heart in New Orleans and Atlanta. He is a co-founding editor of GROTTO. He’s the author of the chapbook Faster, the Whirl Wheel (Greying Ghost, 2025). His poems have appeared in the Action Books Blog, Tagvverk, Tilted House, and mercury firs, among others. He completed an M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.