Saturday 14 March 2015

Erika Meitner's Copia (BOA Editions, 2014)

Some favourite passages:


Objects around us depend on fracture and fragment,
                              are picked clean, derelict--
                              shudder
                                      like hostages without blindfolds
                            or tout survivability
            by trilling in the wet grass.


*


Objects around us are not strangers.
                                                  They are the ruins
                                                  in which we drown.

from "Litany of Our Radical Engagement
with the Material World"


...flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic
shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,
the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hipbones.

from "Big Box Encounter"


Because though this world is changing,
we will remain the same: abundant and
impossible to fill.

the end of "Retail Space Available"


The wind does not howl.

It surgically disassembles 
each set of metal chimes
we hang from the porch eaves.
It nods the tall grass

then tramples it like a pack
of roving dogs.

from "Maple Ridge"


Please excuse me from the meeting.
I'm feeling small and non-combative.

*

To Whom It May Concern: I've moved

to the most difficult place on earth.
It's impossibly blue and blazing.

the beginning and end of 
"To Whom It May Concern"


We leave our attachments in a landscape (deeply felt, uneventful).

from "One Version of December"


                                                                                    Dear

bulldozer, dear grandmother, we are placeless. We are placeful
but unrooted.

from "The Architecture of Memory"


Inside me is a playground, is a factory.
Inside me is a cipher of decay.
I am sometimes a vehicle for absorbing wealth.
Inside me is inbred chaos. 
Inside me is America's greatest manufacturing experience.

the opening lines of "Borderama"







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