Sunday, November 02, 2014

After-Cave at SPD


After-Cave germinates in a space that is desolate and dangerous. It invites the reader to nestle in the narrator’s skin as a movement towards livability is recorded. The words collect on the speaker’s dermis, galvanically; groggily we awake in the eyes of a girl, fifteen, perhaps animal and perhaps human, maybe alive and possibly dead. A hybrid text, After-Cave contains poems and fragments, sentences and paragraphs, experiments in sound and syntax, as well as visual poetry and cartographies. Language moves over the speaker like weather systems and migratory birds, troubling notions of linear time and traversing the spaces of human-made and "natural" disaster. More pressing than hunger is the need to know what “cruelty” means and how one might live in its absence, a series of torsions that displace us from a surface and convey us to its underside, which is to say that After-Cave is a book about the impossible.  How to make the impossible hospitable, and thereby, in one’s way, to prepare oneself to meet one’s friends: human, animal, the always alive and the already-dead. A feminist, feral-poetic odyssey, purring and covered in mud. The words pace themselves on cave time. The better to welcome an encounter that changes us as we wish to be changed.
is this real?