Saturday 20 February 2016

Michelle Detorie's After-Cave (Ahsahta Press, 2014)

Some favourite passages from the book I've just read, Michelle Detorie's first collection, After-Cave. Note I couldn't always recreate her spacing.

These come from the first section, "Fur Birds":


Each of us was asked to speak, and it was with reluctance and kindness that I lied.

*

We swing and twitch the tune, the lungs brimming.

*

The body is broken into parts and yet flows together like water.

*

I am animal; there is no becoming.

*

Your heart, it's a knot
of flames, a knave
of feathers. In
the dream sea, green
words flex and shiver. 


From the second section, "Feralscape":


A book is a room.
I am a house.

*

There are so many pink bones
                           in the yellow paper dress
                      a girl wears into the woods. In this story the trees
                           are sentences that blow away.

*

we sleekly become, without teeth
                              or tongue like
                          seam-ripped frocks:
          silky, frayed, gleaming: a continuance


from the last section, "The Data Is Feminine: After-Cave":


                             Your hair
was yellow then, a spool
of floss wound with light.

*

No sudden for the wintered.

*

You tell me that the pyramids were the product of collaboration, innovative project management, but I know already that what made them was slave labor--a capsized river of bones and blood.




The easiest way I found to obtain Detorie's After-Cave in the UK was through Abe Books here.

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