Andrea Rexilius, Séance of the Bees

 

I found a flight pattern, a ritual, a trace, a beehive, an infinite knot, a way to write and revise, and revise again. A way to resentence the sentence my sister and I had been handed. To change the story by telling our story. To enter a wound. To face it again and again until we are transformed by it. Until we see it clearly and move it through our body.

My sister and I are not related. Not by blood. But we are the same age, and we are both named Andrea. Her mother and my father married when we were 10. I always thought of her as part doppelganger, part mirror-image. I was jealous that her mother fled with her in the night, brought her to America. For me it was the opposite. My mother fled to California but left me behind in Chicago with my dad. My sister’s mother is dramatic, emotional, talkative, whereas my own mother is pragmatic, quiet, and emotionally reserved.

I began stitching lines instead of writing them.

 

A line is a descent, an exception into the underworld, into the root system of language. It marks an act of sensing, of perception translated by the realm of the mouth.

 

I titled the stitches, Séance of the Bees. (“As Long as the Stitch will Hold”)

The latest from Denver, Colorado poet and editor Andrea Rexilius is the poetry title Séance of the Bees (Troy NY: CLASH Books, 2026), a book that extends the title section of her prior collection, Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], writing through and around the death of her sister, and an ongoing grief. “To engage with séance as a form of research. As a way of calling forth,” she writes, near the opening of the collection, “a way of uncovering the feminine. Not to speak as, but to speak alongside. Not to decode or decipher but to create a cacophony. A woven tongue of one. // The collaged poetess as source text. The she as sorceress.” Utilizing collaged text and image, I find it intriguing the way that Rexilius extends this conversation through her own response to grief, to her late sister; furthering what doesn’t or, really, shouldn’t easily or quickly leave, but, as ever, takes the time and the process that it requires, on its own terms. “My sister has to come up again.” she writes, to open “What Asks Us to Be Formed.” “It’s the way repetition works. Something dives down. Another thing comes up for air. To create a hem. Confine. Piece of cloth edging around you. A blank page folding in on the circumference of your body. The subject is one of enclosure and one of breath. To be drowned inside a particular story. The story that is your un-telling.” There is such a physicality, such a tangible quality to Rexilius’ lines, enough that they might hold one aloft, or pull you in. Such heft and heartbreak, one might get lost in.

I’ve been an admirer of Rexilius’ work for some time now, as she is also the author of To Be Human Is To Be a Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) [see my review of such here] and New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here]. There’s such a lyric through her prose, a prose held as poetry, and an interest in constructing collage into such a layered coherence; one that thinks through from a foundation of human empathy and interconnectedness to others; one that has always held an open heart across a fine intelligence and an ear for music. “She will be carried from the flowers of one language to another.” Rexilius writes. “She will be carried downstream to a cave at the edge of the river. Feel behind her stone pathway and mossy roof, inner cathedral singing with the voice of a witch.”

The Way the Language Was

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house.
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

new from above/ground press: Eleftherion, Rexilius, La Rocque + Touch the Donkey,

trauma suture
Melissa Eleftherion
$5
See link here for more information

Afterworld
Andrea Rexilius
$5
See link here for more information

glitch
Lance La Rocque
$5
See link here for more information

Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]
with new poems by Mary Kasimor, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Jason Christie, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Donato Mancini, émilie kneifel and Guy Birchard.
$8
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April-May 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

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Here at above/ground press WORLD HEADQUARTERS, we are attempting to work through the backlog as safely and as carefully as possible. with forthcoming titles by Khashayar Mohammadi, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Jérôme Melançon, ryan fitzpatrick, Dani Spinosa, Mark Scroggins, Michael e. Casteels + Nick Papaxanthos, Rose Maloukis, Sarah Burgoyne, Buck Downs, Paul Perry, Franco Cortese, Andrew Cantrell, Ashley Yang-Thompson + Mikko Harvey, Zane Koss, Dennis Cooley etcetera, as well as a new Touch the Donkey in July, and new issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] edited by Elizbeth Robinson and Jim Johnstone!

And don't forget our summer/pandemic sale! And can you believe the press turns TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD in July?

And I am totally willing to backdate 2020 above/ground press subscriptions, if anyone is so inclined.

PLEASE BE SAFE AND HEALTHY OUT THERE!

Andrea Rexilius, Sister Urn

It is the season of warmth, colorful lights line the houses. Words hearth and

mirth arise. But now a weight grows heavily on our chest, like pneumonia.

Lungs unraveling. Therefore language unraveling. I go for walks in the

neighborhood and gather loose threads from the city’s unhappy bodies. I find

violet threads strung into the nests of birds. Long red threads with the texture

of yarn. Short, fine, yellow threads, barely visible. I store these threads of

collective bodies in wooden jewelry boxes which contain many compartments.

All of the yellow thoughts, all of the blue intertwining all a small lake. (“NESTS OF MAMMALS”)

I’ve been eager for some time to see new work from Denver, Colorado poet Andrea Rexilius, rewarded with both a new title, Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019), and another already announced for next spring, The Way the Language Was (Letter Machine Editions, 2020). Rexilius is also the author of To Be Human Is To Be a Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) [see my review of such here] and New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here]. It is interesting to note dates on such, suggesting her books are composed in bursts, which also might suggest less of a trajectory of books composed consecutively, but concurrently (admittedly, this is entirely speculative). In an interview conducted by Amanda Ngoho Reavey, posted on the Woodland Pattern website on February 25, 2015, Rexilius speaks to the interconnectivity of her writing in general, responding:

AR: To weave again into the previous question, I secretly define my poetics, my pedagogy, my way of being in the world as “to be human is to be a conversation.” What this means is that my previous thinking, previous being, previous experiences are always becoming new, rethought, reconsidered in the present moment and on into the future. A conversation keeps turning, keeps asking questions, keeps thinking in the moment, demonstrating the ecstatic (human), as opposed to the static (not human). In this way I do not think of my books as separate from each other. But at the same time, I do also think of them as discreet documents that can be read separately from one another, or in any order really. They are demonstrative of a rhizomatic style of writing. For instance, the third book answers the question “What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?” that the first book leaves blank. I think of the answer as coming from the third book, in relation to the thinking inherent in that book, as opposed to the thinking of the first book, but I simultaneously see the way the third book is in conversation with the first one not just through this question, but in the way that it considers, in particular, research and relationship. In this way it extends upon and answers back to the first (and second) book. My most recent project also reaches back into this larger conversation by picking up the thread of gesture and residue. In other words, each book opens a detailed nuance of the larger whole. What that whole is doesn’t really matter, or it is “the conversation” whose center point is always evolving.

Contemporary to that interview, she includes this as the opening paragraph to her statement introducing her work in the anthology The Volta Book of Poets (SideBrow Books, 2015) [see my review of such here]:

My work investigates the book as a process of inquiry and is interested in the nature of conversation, questioning, subjectivity, women’s history, and the proximity between physical self and textual self. In my writing and teaching I combine interdisciplinary research with creative process to spawn an approach that is both rigorously intellectual, in the sense of questioning, critical thinking, and essaying, as well as playful and engaged across the disciplines of performance, film, and installation. Related research interests include: contemplative performance poetics, book arts, text-off-the-page, feminism, and aesthetic theory.

I’ve long admired Rexilius’ ability to blend the essay, long poem and lyric/prose poem traditions enough that all exist equally, shifting and turning through a sequence of lyric examinations, much of which focuses on concern both human and ecological, whether large or intimate, and the ways in which language and the body impact upon another.

There are stories about the things human store in trees. I found a human

Heart, spirit of a sleeping girl, journal of a dying witch, Amen. This is the

story of our other life. Eric is an herbalist and I am a bird. I kneel down in

front of a book and weep. It is brown and thin, like the Fox River. It tells a

story of women burnt to the ground. Smart, independent women who read

books, who study plans, who give birth, who understand phases of the

moon and know the ocean’ relationship to blood. The world is not flat in

their notebooks. Their wisdom a form of casting flies. Even as a young girl,

I knew these women. I felt I was one of them. (“NESTS OF MAMMALS”)

Composed in two sections—“SISTER URN” and “NESTS OF MAMMALS”—her opening, title section explores the grief exposed when a sibling dies, her sister Andrea, for whom the book is dedicated. The section opens with a prose poem, moving into a series of short lyric bursts on loss, grief and memory, writing, as in the title poem itself, “The direction of any map as its climate. / I’m the unmoored space beneath what you’ve weathered. / You’re the beautiful crumpled terrain […].” Her precision is powerful, palpable and understated, as noted in this poem, which sits near the beginning of the first section:

GRIEF

Who cross into orphanages of air

find flight. The flightless

carve spaces, remove need.

Ghost the expanse.

walls, windows

into the next.

Some say a thick black line.

Drawn taut against the curvature,

an etching into

cut open round bowl,

a god’s home. Meridian.

Beneath the roots

of a fallen tree. See.

The Volta Book of Poets, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson

SPECULATIVE POETRY

There is no nation but the imagination. Speculative poetry conjures a world that is invisible, a mirage, a false pond. Speculative poetry is the overnight Sims city, a city that is a composite of elsewhere, the city in drag. It imagines the boundless dream metropolis that stitches together factual history and fabulous ethnography. It creates the geopolitical imaginary, building worlds to critique world-building. It makes absurd vatic pronouncements as a means to indirectly apprehend the present. It is the present. The poem speaks in a paper language, a mélange of offshoots, with multiple entryways and exits through its high use of fleeting vernaculars. Its form is code-switching: code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies. speculative poetry is inspired by music that beat-boxes, that dubs, that samples. Its enemy is the drone. It has traded in the persona for the avatar. Its emotional range is not mono (not mono-sincere, not mono-ironic) but stereophonic and excessive. If for the Objectivist poet, one must look clearly at the world, what is the thing that is the image when we live in a constant state of “image flow”? Speculative poetry interrogates, lyricizes, and captures the dematerialized thing, our dematerializing world. Speculative poetry does not escape nor does it shape one reality, but captures the song of layered realities. (Cathy Park Hong)

I’d been looking forward to The Volta Book of Poets, ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2015), for some time, an anthology funded, in large part, through a successful Indiegogo campaign. As the press release to the nearly four hundred page volume informs, “The Volta Book of Poets gathers together the work of 50 talented poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions, providing a constellation of the most exciting, innovative poetry evolving today. Named for the online poetics archive The Volta, The Volta Book of Poets navigates contrasting styles and forms to showcase poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, presenting difference as a means for inspiring a new way to think about poetry, and to inspire readership for the poetry communities and presses radiating out from the poets collected in this essential anthology […].” The list of contributors is impressive, and includes the work of a number of American poets whose work I’ve been following for some time, with some of the most compelling, challenging and lively writing currently appearing out of the United States (something I can also say of the ever-expanding online journal that Wilkinson curates, The Volta). The variety, as well as the quality, is remarkable, and move through the lyric fragment, confession and prose poems to more formal experiments with the line, breath and subject matter. The contributors include: Rosa Alcalá, Eric Baus, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Susan Briante, Sommer Browning, Julie Carr, Don Mee Choi, Arda Collins, Dot Devota, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Graham Foust, C.S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Noah Eli Gordon, Yona Harvey, Matthew Henriksen, Harmony Holiday, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, John Keene, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Juliana Leslie, Rachel Levitsky, Tan Lin, Dawn Lundy Martin, J. Michael Martinez, Farid Matuk, Shane McCrae, Anna Moschovakis, Fred Moten, Sawako Nakayasu, Chris Nealon, Hoa Nguyen, Khadijah Queen, Andrea Rexilius, Zachary Schomburg, Brandon Shimoda, Evie Shockley, Cedar Sigo, Abraham Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Mathias Svalina, Roberto Tejada, TC Tolbert, Catherine Wagner, Dana Ward, Ronaldo V. Wilson and Lynn Xu. As Wilkinson opens his introduction:

My goal in gathering poems for this anthology began as a relatively modest one: to cite a constellation of what is being written today by poets whose work I love. Anybody familiar with poetry is readily stunned by the sheer number of poets currently writing and publishing. But for those unfamiliar with poetry, finding a place to start can be intimidating to say the least. I work at a large public university, so I encounter the curious-yet-uninitiated by the dozens: who to read, where to begin, what websites and journals to follow—let alone what to value and why to value it—all become very tricky questions indeed. It’s hardly a failing of theirs, or ours, as educators; whether you think of it as glut or a golden age of poetry, t’s pretty cacophonous out there. Named for The Volta—an online journal and archive for poetry and poetics I continue to run—this anthology aims, in part, to embrace that cacophony and aid anyone looking to get acquainted with an unusual mix of poetry writing today.

In the pages that follow, you will find poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions working in contrasting styles, utilizing forms inassimilable as a group or school. Poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, methods, and weirdnesses. Poets whose writing disarms and bewilders me. Poems that expand what a poem can say or do. Poetry that “resists the intelligence / Almost successfully,” as Wallace Stevens famously said, or as Tomaž Šalamun put it somewhere, “poems that impassionate me.” And, in fact, some writers in this book blur the boundaries of what even gets called poetry.

The curious problem I encountered in curating this anthology was narrowing it down to just fifty poetry, which had sounded like plenty for a compact, teachable book that wouldn’t just become a doorstop. I still barely scratched the surface of what I believe should be read urgently. Consider this just some of the poets whose work I think anyone interested in poetry should get hooked on.

For Cole Swensen, reflecting on American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, which she edited by David St. John, and responding elegantly to its myriad critics, “To ask an anthology to be inclusive of an entire moment in a culture as large and varied as that of the U.S. is, I think, unrealistic and unwise. For one, it’s an impossible task.” And Ron Silliman, discussing the latest edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paul Hoover, takes this a little further: “It is no longer possible—not even plausible really—for the codex format to represent American or English language poetry in any depth whatsoever.”

This is an incredible list of writers from across the country, published by an array of American small presses, all of whom I would very much recommend: Wave Books, Octopus Books, Omnidawn, Birds, LLC, Ahsahta Press, Nightboat Books, Action Books, Apogee Press, Flood Editions, Four Way Books, Black Ocean, Fence Books, Futurepoem Books, Kenning Editions, Letter Machine Editions, Edge Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Litmus Press, 1913 Press and a couple of others.

My most recent book, Half of What They Carried Flew Away, is based on two major concerns. The first was to ask how one writes from both a narrative and anti-narrative structure simultaneously. How can one sustain a longer duration in writing without relying on narrative techniques like plot, character, or climax? What else might sustain and propel a narrative? The answer of this book was related to the idea of “residences.” These residences (in the book named: desire, water, emanation, weather, and territory) speak to the different ways language inhabits space or how people inhabit language. These habitations might be intimate, ghosted, alien, contradictory, etc.

[…]

As far as my writing practice goes, I don’t write every day. Sometimes I don’t write for months. What typically happens is I feel a silence, or maybe attention is a better word. I don’t write for months, but I feel something going on at the back of the silence/attention. I read and notice and probably begin to curate some ideas, build some questions, but I don’t know them and then one day I just do, and that’s when I begin writing again. So maybe that is to say that the idea or the question comes from a level of consciousness that is not immediately accessible via language. I wait for it to become accessible and in the meantime I try to nourish it. (Andrea Rexilius)

Part of what really makes the anthology exciting, especially for readers already familiar with a number of the poets included, is the fact that each individual section opens with a “poetic statement,” with pieces running the range from the lyric and the experimental to more formal critical prose. Given that each poet is allowed both poems and statement (which might even be the same, for some contributors), it makes the collection a fantastic introduction to contemporary American poetry, much in the same way my own Canadian anthology, side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), attempted over a decade ago. Really, one could say that both poems and statements are individually worth the price of admission alone.

Someone took my book out into the woods and shot it. The book is intimate with violence now in two ways: both as subject matter (violence is what it’s about), and as target. The book reaches the gun as its interlocutor. Or, now the book, with a hole right through the middle, needs to be written again.

But when someone shot my book, I felt it got what it deserved, that it had met its precise right audience. No, I felt the book had received it precise right author. The book had been re-authored, or finally authored, by the bullet. (Julie Carr)

As part of her statement, Brooklyn, New York poet Dorothea Lasky writes that “[…] poetry is always a human thing, in that it is always seeking the human voice among us.” Colorado poet Sommer Browning, in her statement, writes about composing poems as and with terrible jokes: “I hope my poems reflect the way I want to live in the world. I want them to maintain an irreverent reverence at all times, whether that is toward love, beauty, sex, or Being. For me, this is the most honest way I can write, with an askance look toward everything, but with arms ready to embrace it all; so one of my theoretical concerns about all art is that of authenticity, expressive rather than nominal.” In her statement, “RUINS, CAMERA, FLIGHT PATH,” Arizona poet Susan Briante writes:

In “The Book of the Dead,” Muriel Rukeyser famously explained: “Poetry can extend the document.” And in the opening stanzas of that poem as she described a photographer unpacking a camera, she also reminded readers that poetry can be the document. Over the course of that remarkable work, Rukeyser not only chronicles the Gauley Bridge Mining disaster but she contextualizes the event against national legacies of injustice and oppression. By the end, she asks her readers to “widen lens and see… new signals, processes.”

It is the work of a lifetime.