Something comes and I have to learn to speak it…
The Urban Lightwing Professionals dream fearsome baby dreams. They are numb with gossip, everything purple to them. The Urban Lightwing Professionals have lacy tentacled hearts. They have decided to do something. They will do it on their own or together, then sleep beneath undercover covers.
A careful poet will find herself again and again faced with the difficulty of capturing the quiddity of things without reducing or stripping them of their strangeness, of telling us about the world without seeming to claim ownership..In Welcker’s hands, the stable categories…that allow us to organize and discipline our emotional responses to others—that allow us to define away the compassion we ought to feel—are made suspect. The resulting book is unsettling, unforgettable, a map of the world that respects no borders, respects no limiting names, and reminds us that “Counting is a system that does not involve seeing.” — Levi Stahl (The Quarterly Conversation).
I feel so grateful to live in a world that has books such as The Botanical Garden. Lyric elegy, futuristic science fiction, aliens and whales, oulipian listing. it is all here in this beautifully moving book. — Juliana Spahr ( NUCLEAR, THIS CONNECTION OF EVERYONE WITH LUNGS, and THE TRANSFORMATION)
when you have a body / as I do our bodies will speak a language and it will exist / in-between // translate into being alive
the “wire-breath” of Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2009).
Meg Hamill it is difficult, so very difficult, to praise and lament (on her Trillions & Trillions of Heartbeats, Resonant Books).
Books discussed in this essay:
• it. Inger Christensen. (Trans. Susanna Nied. New Directions. $17.95. 304 pp.
• Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, editors. Routledge. $47.95. 224 pp.
• The Poethical Wager. Joan Retallack. University of California Press. $24.95. 291 pp.
• Night is a Sharkskin Drum. Haunani-Kay Trask. University of Hawai’i Press. $27.00. 96 pp.
• Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Bamboo Ridge Press. $16.00. 148 pp.
