BiblioVault

u&i

Cassandra Smith

Omnidawn, 2015

u&i is a meditation on the imaginary—what exists and what doesn’t, how does something exist when it knows it is imaginary, how is it to be reckoned with. u&i asks what exists when a book is written. u&i is telling a story to the things that are actual loss. Things that are gone become further proof of existence and not. u&i asks what are the can and can’t of existence, as well as the cant of existence—the domestic and repeating cant, as things circle themselves until they think they exist a little more. There is, in u&i, cant as incantation.

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Underscore

Julie Carr

Omnidawn, 2024

Tender lyric poetry dedicated to two of the poet’s most influential late teachers.

Julie Carr’s most intimate book to date, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender—at times erotic at other times bitter—these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.

Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”

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The Unfollowing

Lyn Hejinian

Omnidawn, 2016

The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. Outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.

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