In “Valiant,” inside “Driving Emergencies,” a car is stopped. The scene takes eleven words: “Roared orders, lights / pulled up beside us. / Our chances look terrible.” The poem does not slow down to explain why the chances look terrible. It accelerates — “after the first / warning shot telling me / it wasn’t about race” — and keeps going: “We road on regardless. / Magnificent, unprotected.” Road as a verb. The grammar refuses to stop even where the police have required it to.

The book’s notes page carries only three entries, and one of them places a weight beneath the entire collection. It explains that “Good morning, my kings and queens” — the title of one of the collection’s few poems not named for a car — was the greeting Sandra Bland used in her Sandy Speaks videos before she was found dead, hanging in a jail cell, three days after being taken into custody for a traffic violation in Texas in 2015. Fagin does not elaborate, and the poems never mention Bland again. They don’t need to. The note sits under the whole book the way a road sits under a trip. self-driving is a collection about what driving is when the driver is a Black woman in America: an activity for which the state has a curriculum, a set of stops, and a body count.

※

The apparatus is deceptively tidy. Sixty-one poems, nearly all titled for American car models — Flex, Dart, Valiant, Suburban, Century, Mustang, Eldorado — arranged in three sections whose names come not from Kerouac but from the driver’s-education manual: “Sharing the Road,” “Defensive Driving,” “Driving Emergencies.” The curriculum is the plot. The first section believes, provisionally, in coexistence; the second learns to watch; the third counts casualties. “Scorpio” opens the emergencies on an imperative — “Prison me in my pawnshop suit. Politicize my death.” — and the section never walks it back.

Read the fleet closely and much of it has already reached the junkyard. Oldsmobile alone supplies some ten titles — a marque General Motors shut down in 2004. Across the larger fleet, an aspirational vocabulary of Intrigue, Starliner, Elite, Imperial, and Aspire has become the naming rights to nothing. Fagin has assembled America’s discarded self-descriptions and driven each one around the block. The poems wear their titles like bodies wear body styles: “Dart” moves in hard-enjambed couplets that merge across their own lane lines; “Scorpio” and “Flex” run long-block verse paragraphs; “Suburban” idles down the page in two-beat lines. The forms are builds.

Then there is the second voice. Thirty-two of the sixty-one poems carry an italic parenthetical under the title, and the distribution is the argument: four in “Sharing the Road,” twelve of seventeen in “Defensive Driving,” sixteen of twenty-four in “Driving Emergencies.” The annotator arrives with the threat and never leaves. The registers vary — gazetteer etymology in “Firenza” (good water, good place to camp); appraisal-speak in “Suburban” (crime happened here) and its softened twin, “Valiant” (bad thing happened here), the same formula at two euphemism settings; a whisper in “Crossfire” (keep quiet, baby here); a trail mark in “Expedition” (I went this way); a con’s assessment in “Toronado” (easy marks); and once, in “New Yorker,” a quotation — (“New blood, new rules.”), lifted, the notes explain, from subway posters advertising a prison drama’s fourth season. The glosses read like the interior instruction-track of a driver who cannot afford an unrecorded moment. Vigilance, in this book, is a form of annotation.

※

The jacket places self-driving “in the tradition of the on-the-road narrative,” and the tradition is present the way a chalk outline is present. Denver appears twice in the collection — Kerouac’s axial city, here a site of retreat and repair rather than arrival: “Rewilding Denver, made holy again / at least around the airport,” coyotes recolonizing their territories through underground tunnels. “Trailblazer,” glossed (get out of town quick), glances down the old Part Four route — “Panama and Mexico / down that road” — but the flight it imagines is the sundown-town kind, not the sacramental one. What Fagin takes from the road book is its itinerary; what she declines is its theology. The version of the road narrative canonized by Kerouac — a sovereign “I” at the wheel, the country as his proving ground — is exactly what these poems exist to dismantle, and they dismantle it in the grammar first. Nouns are repeatedly forced into motion: “we limousined,” “I loudspeaker over them,” “I traffic,” “this loving could car.” The language will not hold still in the driver’s seat, and neither will the pronouns, which run heavily to we and us. Where Kerouac’s men drove to find themselves, these poems drive to disperse one.

The costs of the trip are itemized without ceremony. “Starliner” records the checkpoint: “got asked for proofs. For identification. / Innocent presence, being brown, being flesh.” “Executive,” glossed (Have you ever stood on a factory floor?), prices the route’s labor: “Jobs outsourced overseas / for cheaper non-union labor.” “Dart,” glossed (poor people live here), ends on the fleet’s youngest inheritors: “Arms all sons / as babies: little guns, / little cars already parked.” That last image is the book in miniature — the vehicle assigned before the child can drive, the parking spot as destiny. “Meteor” reaches further back for the same indictment: “Where covered wagons / rotted, people first became interested in heaven.” Expansion, in Fagin’s history, begins to look like a burial practice with good publicity.

※

Fagin has said in an interview that the book is nominally about cars but is not about cars at all — that it is about the self, a vehicle. She has practiced Buddhist teaching for years, and the acknowledgments bow to her dharma teachers; the poems carry the doctrine lightly, as weather rather than sermon. Its clearest statement comes at the end of “Toronado,” after the poem has inventoried the era’s grief cycle — “not marked safe, await / the next tragedy,” mourning “cashed out on thoughts and prayers” — and it comes with the compression of a credo: “I believe in just this, fleeting.”

Which is why the line the publisher chose to sell the book deserves a closer look. The jacket calls it “a bold declaration”: “I knew my rights / were all the rights, my freedoms all the freedoms.” In “Skyliner,” glossed (dry town), the line is not a declaration. It is a memory. The poem retreats “to pleasant memories of Denver being only me”: “I lived by myself, cooked for myself. No one / to answer to but myself.” Then, across a stanza break, “I knew my place / was everywhere” — and only then the rights, all of them, the freedoms, all of them. Every verb is past tense. The sovereignty being described is the remembered condition of a self alone, and the poem’s business is to give it up: “Lose everything, / everyone. Even this. Goodbye old car.” The jacket clips the tense and sells the book on the ego it exists to surrender.

The surrender is not defeat. “Expedition” ends with the collection’s most direct seizure of agency — “Driven by / reverie, I take the wheel.” — and “New Yorker” turns the prison ad’s marketing back on its audience in six words: “I could have been your cellmate.” The wheel gets taken; the solidarity gets stated. What goes is the fantasy that taking the wheel makes anyone the protagonist of the road. “Jetstar,” back in the first section, had already said where this was heading: “Sleep meant this road. The road we’re on.”

So the ending, when it comes, is the right refusal. “Meteor,” the book’s last poem, glossed (I ate), watches a self grow “unfamiliar with the driver’s seat, / exerting will, direction, concentrated force” — the title’s thesis, stated once, at the exit — and then closes the whole American genre down in eleven words: “Nobody. Lonesome America, / thinking myself saved, never leaving home.” Sixty poems of highway, and the book arrives by staying. Kerouac’s heirs have been driving that road for seventy years looking for the country. Fagin’s driver, knowing what the road does to drivers like her, pulls in, cuts the engine, and keeps the self that survives the trip: provisional, collective, fleeting, home.

J.M.C. Kane is the author of the non-fiction book Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). His prose work has been published in more than three dozen literary journals & magazines, including Plough, Camas, AMERICA Magazine, Commonweal, Smokelong Quarterly, and The New Ohio Review, where his essay, “Nomenclature of a Life”, cataloguing his experience as an ASD-1, was awarded the 2026 Ellis Prize for Non-Fiction. Kane received the Honorable Mention in the 2026 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize and his recent poem “Sediment” was the runner-up in the 2025 Gulf Coast Journal Poetry Prize. He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an environmental attorney.