Advertisement
Advertisement
Heliopause, Christle's most recent book, is her most effective yet in that regard. It brushes that feverish imagination against a more historical anatomy, that of technology, communication, exploration, and death. The book is centered around a subset of three longer poems, in which the author's grip attends more meticulously than ever on its outline in space and time. There is, for instance, "Disintegration Loop 1.1," a 13-page work divided into segments that visually mimic the William Basinski recordings of the same name, a fragment-based ambient project the composer is said to have completed on the morning of September 11, 2001.Pronounced effects produced from minor detail are a key component of Christle's writing, and help to make it so immersive, while at the same time unassuming of clear shape. The anatomy of her images are often simple ones—flowers, the sky, language, blood, birds, quiet, clothing, people—yet in the same breath made mysterious, contemplative, a drug-without-a-drug.Like words? Here are three short, savage books you have to read.
Advertisement
Advertisement
you seem to end
I have loved youThere was that small
and dead and pink
bird we sawnear the sidewalk
with its smashed
open moutha place to let
the world in
a way of not ending
Advertisement
I had to crawl insideDRAPESThere were erecting a conversational
in the middle of the inconsequential
afternoon
like one of those unnatural flowers
you drop into water and watch
immediately blossom
And then then what
Has anything changed?
They were emigrating from one wall
to the other
like swans of
ungodly proportions
They were not so much
humans as blood drenched with hairNOT MUCH MORE ROOM IN THE CEMETERYI will lie down on top of the graves
People beneath and people behind me
with their faces and their little horns
and the places from which they are shining
I know there is something else
that they have tried to teach me
and I am sorry for all of the times
I have listened and not learned it
No I am not crying
I'm maybe um a demon
For certain I am waving this fruit fly awayBuy Heliopause here.Follow Blake on Twitter.