Sunday, April 30, 2023

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Indermaur

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review and is the winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Coast|noCoast, Ecotone, Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Fort Collins, Colorado.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, I|I, came out on November 15, 2022 from Seneca Review Books. It changed my life in so many ways, but perhaps the most interesting to you and your readers is the way it made a certain kind of thinking possible for me. I|I is a book-length work, a serial lyric essay, so while it is fragmented, there is also endurance present. And with endurance comes a kind of rigor not achieved in the typical single-page, social media-friendly poem form we’re used to seeing these days. I was able to see for the first time the way my brain wrestles with the subject matter of I|I—vision, self-perception, mirrors, mental health—and comes to a new understanding with it through that very endurance.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to poetry the way one comes to a crush—I was totally enamored. Poetry felt like magic because it wasn’t obvious or even really explicable how what was on the page made me feel. I wanted to be a part of its magic, to write into that place that seemed the truest to human experience, the place of revelation as in to literally reveal.

To be clear, I|I lives in the space between poetry and nonfiction, but I think of myself as a poet first, and of I|I often through that lens. (To me, betweenness feels like a space poetry inhabits.)

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I just gave birth to my first baby last June, so I’m struck by how different all my answers are now compared to what they were back when I was writing I|I, or working on other projects before she arrived. From start to submission of the final version, I|I took about four years. At first I didn’t realize I was writing a book, but my MFA workshop cohort and professors insisted there was more for me to uncover, more work for me to do on the topic than just a few short poems or pages.

I think my writing initially comes quickly, but then revisiting the drafts is a much slower process. For lengthy projects, I tend to chase an initial spark of interest, then realize I have to follow that up with reading or researching or otherwise experimenting off the page in order to come back to it and make something meaningful.

Since I’ve been a mom, I definitely take copious notes, mostly in my phone between tasks or while breastfeeding. So far I’ve been able to sit down and look at those notes and write something resembling a poem from them exactly once!

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It depends on the project! With I|I and one in-progress manuscript, I realized pretty early on that the subject matter demanded a full-length form. I have recently tended toward writing longer, multi-page poems, but one of my manuscripts-in-progress consists (currently) solely of very brief lyric poems, mostly fewer than a dozen lines each. I feel like that only works for me because it’s in the context of a much broader project, though.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I can’t say I enjoy the act of reading publicly, but what I truly enjoy is being in a room with other people who are there to think about the same kinds of things I’m there to think about. The community we form together at a reading is invaluable to me because writing can feel pretty lonely, even though I’m often thinking about the reader while I’m doing it. Readings seem to lie outside my creative process, but they feel essential to the part of writing that is being a writer.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Light and distance and the implications that these facts of our universe have on divinity come up in my writing over and over again, even when I’m ostensibly writing about, say, environmental collapse. I guess there’s an element of hope inherent in those phenomena for me in the same way that there’s an element of despair, too. I’m obsessed with the nexus of those opposites, and why hope is so beautiful when it is necessitated by absence—of a solution, of a god, of answers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

As much as I bristle at claiming to know what the role of a writer in our culture should be, I do have a few guiding principles for myself. The main one is that I should give back to our community by supporting other writers, whether through reading, teaching, writing reviews, or sharing their work. I’m thinking of Ross Gay’s paraphrasing of Fred Moten in Inciting Joy, which I’m currently reading: “We’ve got to get together to figure out how to get together.” Putting my work out there into the world is really, I think, an attempt to get us together.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both! I have the experience of being both an editor and a writer, and as an editor, it can feel so nerve-wracking to have to lightly say to the author, “Hey, so I fact-checked this, and you’re wrong.” As a writer, I’ve also been on the receiving end of that very statement. Ultimately if you as a writer care about your reader, that’s something that can unite your efforts with your editor’s, and you can think about your editor as a reader, too—albeit a very vocal one.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I had a poetry professor in college, Alan Shapiro, who I remember told us to follow our discomfort while writing—to trust it, in a way. I have found that to be so true. If I’m nervous about including something in my writing, if it feels risky, there’s often a lot of energy there, what some of my poet friends have called “the white-hot center of a poem,” or “the central anxiety of a poem.” That’s often where you’re being the most vulnerable, and what I’ve found to be the most meaningful and rewarding about my own work is to trust that vulnerability—in myself and others. Vulnerability is where we connect.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

When reading, I gravitate most to nonfiction writers who are also poets (Maggie Nelson, Ross Gay, Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Terry Tempest Williams, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Claudia Rankine, Kylan Rice) or who otherwise have very strong poetic sensibilities (Brian Doyle, Eliot Weinberger, Ellen Meloy, Rebecca Solnit) because what I like most is nonfiction that moves associatively, the way poetry does. To me, the mind is the driving force of the essay, whereas in poetry it doesn’t have to be. Poetry is often more instinctual; nonfiction has to back up its instincts, justify them. Moving between nonfiction and poetry has been thus at the whim of the subject matter for me. If it needs to be more about my mind, about investigating the mind, then nonfiction it is—or has been, so far.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wish! Before my baby was born, I would often write in the mornings before I went to work (I work a typical office job, 8-to-5 situation). Now all that is in flux. The most I can do is read while breastfeeding and type notes toward writing in my smartphone in the stolen moments between caretaking. So a typical day begins with being woken up by a hungry baby, feeding her, and getting ready for work. Not very glamorous but certainly essential and lifegiving.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I feel most inspired to write when I’m reading excellent writing whose thinking I admire. Second-best is observing art in other media, or spending time in nature. My brain is often at its most creative when I’m taking a walk outside, but I need to be immersed in texts to actually come up with something worth saying on the page myself.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sagebrush after a summer rainstorm reminds me of my home in the Rocky Mountain West, but blooming azaleas and daffodils are what remind me of growing up in North Carolina.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I love listening to podcasts like Radiolab or watching PBS documentary series like Nature and Nova for how they spark curiosity and are accessible to people who didn’t major in STEM, like me. Spending time outside is also really important to me and the main reason why I live where I do. I like recreating outdoors, but I also love just sitting in a camp chair and looking up at a mesa in New Mexico or a granite cliff in Wyoming or a red canyon in Utah or a snowy peak in Colorado. I love learning about the native plants and animals here; I use the app iNaturalist to identify what I observe. I also love keeping my own vegetable garden. But I think the influence that all this time spent outside has on my writing can be somewhat subtle; it’s more an overwhelming love for the world. As Pam Houston writes, “the Earth doesn’t know how not to be beautiful.”

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m looking up at my bookshelves while I type a response to this question, because I am easily stumped when some well-meaning stranger at some benign get-together asks me, “Who are your favorite poets?” Every time! I feel like I need to carry around a notecard in my wallet. So here is what my bookshelves (and library history) are saying: all works by Rainer Maria Rilke, H. D., Christian Wiman, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Simone Weil, Terry Tempest Williams, and W. S. Merwin; the magazine Orion; Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight; Paisley Rekdal’s “Nightingale: A Gloss”; Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem; Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette; Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard; Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red; Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variations on Dawn and Dusk; Mary Rakow’s incredible Biblical novel This Is Why I Came; Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for the beauty of a life lived in the mountains; and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to float the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park. I want to do a hut-to-hut backpacking trip through the Swiss Alps. I want to see Alaska. I want to become proficient at trad climbing. I want to kayak the mangrove swamp in Congaree National Park. I want to ice skate on an alpine lake in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

When it comes to writing, I don’t have as many specific goals. I’d love to publish a collection of shorter poems, as my first book was a book-length work, but really I just want to keep making things I’m proud of and excited to share with the world.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I can’t imagine I’d be some other kind of artist, as I’m not really good enough at any other craft! When I was young, I thought alternately about being a spy (thanks, Harriet), a volcanologist, a Navy SEAL, or one of those scientists who climbs redwood trees—apparently anything involving risk and adventure. Let’s go with volcanologist!

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

As soon as I could read, I loved books. I loved the worlds they created, the characters you got to know, the stories they shared. I was also raised to revere the Bible, so text really was magical. I wrote stories in grade school—most of which I abandoned part of the way through, then lyrics to little songs, and then poetry in high school.

Aside from a love for books and language, I have teachers to thank for making me write. From elementary to graduate school, I had incredible teachers who taught me how to love writing. What more could you ask from education, to learn how to love something for the rest of your life?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was Geoffrey Babbitt’s Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), which is a beautiful and confounding exploration of illuminated manuscripts and spiritual identity. Appendices is ever-so-aware of its being a text, and takes full advantage of its form, which I love. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I’ve found myself thinking and talking a lot about White Noise, the new Netflix adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. The way the American family is portrayed and in the 80’s—this era of great excess and self-absorption and apocalyptic fear—feels deeply true, but also weird as fuck. And I like the new LCD Soundsystem song that plays as the end credits roll, “new body rhumba.”

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m slowly working on and thinking about two projects. The first is a series of poems on and sometimes in the voice of Egeria, a female Christian pilgrim from the fourth century who was the first known woman to summit several peaks like Mount Sinai, and whose writings from her travels have partly survived to today.

The second project is a long poem-kind-of-thing about the process of my baby’s acquisition of language. I’m adding to it every so often as new things occur to me, happen to me, teach me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Friday, April 28, 2023

Camille Martin, R

Light is not
inevitable. Overshot it
or not yet there.
Nothing, for that
matter. In any case,
not arrived. Anything
could have been
otherwise.

The latest from Toronto poet and collagist Camille Martin is the poetry title, R (Toronto ON: Rogue Embroyo Press, 2023), following a list of books and chapbooks over the years, including Plastic Heaven (New Orleans: single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996), Magnus Loop (Tucson, Arizona: Chax Press, 1999), Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 1999), Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007), Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010), If Leaf, Then Arpeggio (above/ground press, 2011), Looms (Shearsman Books, 2012), Sugar Beach (above/ground press, 2013) and Blueshift Road (Rogue Embryo Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It is interesting that, after a period of relative silence, she has quietly reemerged through self-publication, offering a first (Blueshift Road) and now this second full-length collection (R), since the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns. Still, with pieces that originally appeared in a handful of journals and anthologies, as well as in the chapbooks Magnus Loop and Sugar Beach, it suggests that this particular manuscript has been gestating for some time. The one hundred and fifty pages of this collection are predominantly articulated as a sequence of short, untitled, haiku-like bursts, each carved into the centre of the page. It is almost as though these meditative bursts are attempts to achieve and articulate balance, seeking a grounding effect through this sequence of carved sketchworks. Each poem is thoughtful, observational; settling into short-form thought and speech via playful scraps. “plastic raspberries linked with safety pins,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “dull flavour of stewed rubies // stoplight blinking in a junkyard [.]” Each poem offers sketch and pause through an effect of collage, suggesting a construction similar to the images presented on the front and back cover: a suggestion of simultaneous image and idea, carved, clipped, collected and formed into poem-shapes that retain their collage-simultaneity through each tightly-packed singular effect. There is an enormous amount going on in these poems, clearly.

shadow concealing
colour, colour
shedding cells

Thursday, April 27, 2023

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee's debut full-length poetry collection The Animal in the Room is forthcoming from Coach House Books in May 2023. She is also the author of two chapbooks (What I Meant to Ask and The Bones & Eggs & Beets) and co-creator of Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Obviously, we poets have to be good at spending a lot of time and energy on our work with very little external validation. I've been so fortunate to have a few big successful milestones recently, including getting into an awesome poetry PhD program and my first book getting accepted for publication at a wonderful publisher. And to be honest, that external validation does work on me! It makes me feel like I KNOW what I'm doing, instead of just hoping I know.

So I feel like my work these days is more self-assured and ambitious. I don't know where that confidence boost is going to take me. We'll see.

More than anything, it means everything to me that other people are actually reading what I write and spending time with my work. That's why I write. It means everything.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or nonfiction?


The mediums I work in most often are poetry, comics, and screenwriting. I'm not sure exactly why, but it's very rare that I have an idea I want to explore through prose more than I want to explore it through a poem or a scene or a comic. The reasons for that are completely mysterious to me, because I really enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction! I just rarely have an impulse towards creating it.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am a pretty fast, hard writer once I get going! I fear and admire poets who carefully revise and slowly edit over months and months, but I don't work like that!

Whether we're talking about a single poem or a giant project, something tends to blindside me out of nowhere and whine at me until it gets finished. Whatever "it" is, it comes and looks for you. I'm a big believer that if a poem is talking to you, it needs to be written right away, as much as you can. It might not get finished that day, but I'm always grateful when I follow that voice or that whine.

Once I've drafted a poem, I often revise it as many times as I need to, once or twice or twenty times, within the first day or two. I don't need to finish it, but I need to finish it as much as I can. A few of my poems, about 10 percent, get stuck in the early stages, and those are the ones you just put away and wait until you know what to do with them, weeks or years later.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I used to be a very poem-focused poet. I liked the idea of the self-contained unit, the little room -- neat and tidy and a world of its own.

I still like thinking about my poems like that! But ever since I finished writing Animal in the Room I've been increasingly interested in what I could do with sequences and interconnected series of poems, including my chapbooks and full-length book projects. Right now, I love playing with repetition, because it creates alternative realities, rhizomes, new connections. I'm fascinated by those branches, tensions, links, and ligaments between pages. In comics theory, they talk about "hyperlinks" or "arthrology" -- the study of connections between and across texts.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I don't have a huge amount of experience with readings yet, but I do enjoy them! I want to do more! I put a lot of care into how my work sounds, because I hope some readers will want to read the poems out loud.

I also really love the experience of reading with other poets and writers, firstly because I like meeting them, and also because of those wonderful, unexpected connections between poems that often spring up at public readings. I love those!

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Sometimes I'm concerned that I'm not intentional enough in formulating a theoretical framework for what I'm writing. My process is very form-based -- I like to pick one or more patterns or formal features and just see where they take me. Let the poem go where it wants to go.

But I also recognize that that's just a process, not a theory. If you write like me, one of the things you have to be concerned about, and responsible about, is that a form-first process doesn't absolve you of your authorship. You're still responsible for what the poem does.

So basically, my theoretical concerns, my process, and my questions all have to do with the same kind of thing: how meaning and structure work together, and create each other, again and again and every time we write. And every time we read, or try to understand the physical world, that's also what's happening: meaning versus structure. I guess Meaning/Structure and Theory/Practice map onto each other, to a certain extent.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think there are many necessary roles for all kinds of writers and artists in our culture. Personally, I think of myself as doing a craft -- my job is to create things that are useful or interesting or pleasing to someone. There's a good Dylan Thomas quote that says that a poem is a contribution to reality. I like to think about my work like that.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?


Last summer I had the great honor of working with Coach House, and with Susan Holbrook to edit my poetry manuscript. I was really thrilled when my book was accepted for publication, but I'll never forget talking to Susan on the phone for the first time. She immediately summarized the whole book in this perfect, insightful, intellectual way, better than I ever could have. I was floored. I think it was the first moment in my life when I felt someone had really understood my work -- not just what an individual poem might mean, but my intentions, and everything I was trying to do on a larger scale. I'm so grateful to her for that moment. I'll never forget it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?


When I met Phoebe Wang at UNB in 2021 she gave me some wonderful advice: to be patient. She told me that I could write quickly and impatiently, but then I had to be very patient about publishing, career, and everything that comes after. I'm not a patient writer, but I think that was good advice!

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaborating on a graphic novel)? What do you see as the appeal?


People have told me they find this weird, but it's always easy and fun for me to move between genres! I enjoy the variety: comics, poetry, screen. They're all very different in terms of skills, audience, collaboration, everything. But the more I work in multiple genres, the more I discover all these interesting connections and transferable skills & techniques. Anyway, the main appeal to me is that I'm just following my creative interests, and following opportunities to work with artists and projects I like.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I would like to have a regular schedule, but between studying, teaching, writing, and sports, every day is a bit different! On my ideal day, I go to the gym first thing in the morning, then have two or three big blocks of serious work time after that. But the ideal day isn't a real day, is it?

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don't usually feel stalled. But I find I'm most productive and pleased with myself when I'm writing towards a project. I like that feeling of a target, where every little scrap of an idea or line seems pointed towards a larger thing.

If I'm not currently working on a project, I invent one, like writing a sonnet just because, or writing about the last TV show I watched, or whatever. If I'm really stuck, I just do some editing of my own poems, or just read someone else's poems. That always does the trick.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My partner James is a brilliant baker! A pot of coffee brewing and something baking in the oven are the ultimate home-y smell for me.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Movies, nature, and visual art are huge influences and frequent topics in my poems! Recently I'm experimenting with poems about sports and athletes, which is a new and unfamiliar influence.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

This is such a difficult question because there are too many to narrow it down! I'm just going to throw out four writers who are at the tip of my tongue today because I've re-read them recently: Louise Gluck, Jack Kirby, James Baldwin, Gord Downie, Joy Harjo.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

In poetry, one of my dreams is to work collaboratively with visual artists or musicians! I'd love to publish a poetry-comic hybrid text, or to write words for songs, operas, or live performances.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I've often considered becoming a yoga teacher! Maybe I'll still do that at some point?

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Like a lot of us, I think I do this because I wouldn't be completely satisfied doing something else. Or at least I wouldn't be completely satisfied. I enjoy a lot of different types of work. Teaching makes me happy. Coaching sports and playing sports does too. I enjoyed working on movies and doing script consulting. But ultimately I think I need to write. Like your question says, something made me write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Film: Fire of Love

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am right on the exhilarating cusp between two big poetry projects!

I just hit "send" on a manuscript called Nebulas, which is about space, strawberries, and Walt Whitman. I think it's the best work that I've ever done and I can't wait to share it with everyone.

My next big thing is a series of lyric poems about dead and injured athletes. I don't want to say too much because it's still taking its shape! It's cooking!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Joe Hall, Fugue and Strike

 

FUGUE 11 | HELLO, MY SLEEP

Hello, my sleep, my dawn thing
milk welling in the eyes     

of night—if you should let me
if 6 am should slice this

cannister, carry the egg of this thought
in its mouth through the colliding

fonts of sensoria—the eyes of night
open, it all leaks out

this sleep just a plane
on the polyhedron: sleep, our sleep

rising over the world (“FROM FUGUE & FUGUE”)

The fourth full-length collection by Buffalo, New York “poet, critic and junk bookmaker” Joe Hall, following Pigafetta Is My Wife (Boston MA/Chicago IL: Black Ocean, 2010), The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013) and Someone’s Utopia (Black Ocean, 2018) is Fugue and Strike: Poems by Joe Hall (Black Ocean, 2023). Fugue and Strike is constructed out of six poem-sections—“From People Finder Buffalo,” “From Fugue & Strike,” “Garbage Strike,” “I Hate That You Died,” “The Wound” and “Polymer Meteor”—ranging from suites of shorter poems to section-length single, extended lyrics. Hall’s poems are playful, savage and critical, composed as a book of lyric and archival fragments, cutting observations, testaments and testimonials. “[…] to become a poet / is to kill a poet,” he writes, as part of the poem “FUGUE 6 | JACKED DADS OF CORNELL,” “cling to a poet / in the last hour, before slipping into the drift / atoms of talk bounce in cylinders down Green St, predictive tongue / in the aleatory frame stream of vaticides […].”

Throughout the first section, Hall offers fifty pages of lyric lullabies and mantras towards a clarity, writing of sleep and machines, fugues and their possibilities. “each poem / an easter egg,” he writes, as part of “FUGUE 40 | DEBT AFTER DEBT,” “w/ absence inside and inside absence / you are hunger, breathing this time and value / particularized into mist, you are there, at the end / of another shift […].” The second section, “Garbage Strike,” subtitled “BUFFALO & ITHICA, NY, USA / JAN-MAY 2019,” responds to, obviously, a worker’s strike that the author witnessed, and one examined through a collage of lyric and archival materials from the time. Echoing numerous poets over the years that have responded to issues of labour—including Philadelphia poet ryan eckes, Winnipeg poet Colin Brown, Vancouver poet Rob Manery and the early KSW work poets including Tom Wayman and Kate Braid—Hall’s explorations sit somewhere between the straight line and the experimental lyric, attempting to articulate a kind of overview via the collage of lyric, prose and archival materials. There is something of the public thinker to Hall’s work, one that attempts to better understand the point at which capitalism meets social movements and action, all of which attempts to get to the root of how it is we should live responsibly in the world. There’s some hefty contemplation that sits at the foundation of Hall’s writing. Or, as he writes near the end, to open “POLYMER METEOR”:

George Oppen wrote in “Discreet Series,” “Rooms outlast you.” Pithy. And also indicative of a relation to time that is modest, sobering. We die, apartments go on. Their floors get scratched by someone else’s chairs. Their vents fill with the dust of someone else’s life. But those rooms also go, demolished to make way for some other, pricier structure. Or those rooms are split open to moisture and creatures seeking shelter in a zone of divestment. A frame of time in which things live decades to centuries.

Through notes on the poem/section included at the back of the collection, Hall writes that “In terms of the content of Garbage Strike, the researcher must now sweep up after the poet. Garbage Strike is meant to be suggestive; it grew from a small archive of peoples’ insurgent imagination in relation to waste. It’s not thorough historical scholarship, and I remain a student of the subject.” Further on, his note ends:

As recent scholars like Charisse Burden-Stelly have persuasively theorized the operations of racial capitalism in the modern US context, new directions for the work open up. For instance, to seek more on-the-ground facts about these struggles and to understand their relation to the operations of racial capitalism through the contexts those facts provide. To learn to recognize how particular individuals and institutions translate the dynamics of racial capitalism into distributions of waste, hierarchies of labor, and extraction of profits—and the multifarious ways people get together and fight back.