12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marcella Durand

Marcella Durand’s [photo credit: Corinne Botz] latest book, A Winter Triangle, received the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and was published in 2025 by Fordham University Press. She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry, published by MIT Press in Fall 2024, and the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Other books include To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2022), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), The Garden of M./Le Jardin de M., translated by Olivier Brossard and published in a bilingual edition by joca seria, 2016, and a book-length translation of Michele Metail’s constraint-based work, Earth’s Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, (Black Square Editions, 2020). 

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

My first book was a chapbook, Lapsus Linguae, the first in a series of chapbooks published in the 1990s by Situations Press, edited by Kimberly Lyons and Joe Elliot. It was such a thrill to see my poems in chapbook form, and I’m still very fond of how a chapbook can hold longer poems or a series of related poems that are not "book" length. Lapsus Linguae also has a heavy letterpressed cover of textured paper—another aspect of the chapbook, that you can bring a visual or sculptural heft to it. Happily, Lapsus Linguae is available again online, thanks to the wonderful Blue Bag Press.

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

I tried writing a short story once and quickly realized that creating characters or working out a plot line were not for me. My parents are both visual artists, and so I appreciate how poetry is more related to other arts, like painting and music, that can sit free of linearity, and how I can experiment in so many ways with poetry. I love its potency too, and the concentration of it. I love the poetic line and how a line may unfurl along the page toward either an enjambment, or a stop, or fragment, or divert into another unexpected direction. That said, I made my living for a long time as a writer, editor, and copy editor—I worked for various publications, weekly neighborhood newspapers, niche enthusiast and lifestyle magazines, art journals, medical writing… It was a totally different writing process, extremely hardheaded and linear with of course lots of external constraints, but I enjoyed putting articles together, deciding which quotes to use from an interview, when to insert a data point, what the lede should be, etc., and I sort of miss that tactile sense of organizing information in the most direct and coherent way possible to connect with various audiences (especially in medical writing) and provide them very immediately with resources.

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? 

Most of my projects take years, from initial idea onward. I’m a heavy reviser (or self-cannibalizer) and will revise right up to when someone else takes the work away from me. I keep journals with a lot of notes—notes while reading, or seeing art, or just interesting words or word combinations—so I’ll return to those journals often. They are sort of my seedbed. Every once in a great while, due to an inexplicable confluence of unknowable factors, I’ll be struck by lightning and a poem will emerge immediately from the sizzle. But otherwise, I've got a zillion drafts.

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? 

I mostly have a concept, or even a title—usually several going simultaneously. The concept will slowly let itself be known to me—in that I keep thinking about it and turning it over in my mind, until a potential structure of poems start to emerge. I really love titles, and have lists of them, and they are sort of concepts too, like The Light Factory, A Winter Triangle, No Trees, Circles for Wheelmakers. I'll often write toward and from those title/concepts. Or I'll group discrete poems that seem to belong to that greater concept.

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

Edwin Torres once advised me to read as though I loved my own work, and I think I am finally arriving to that, feeling love for my poems and the words in them, or at least savoring and allowing space to the words in their order. And feeling love for the audience, whose live presence I value in these days of electric isolation. I practice a lot before a reading and that is part of the revision process, as I'll hear (or hopefully hear) what's clunky, etc. But I'm not a "performer"--I have issues with engaging in spectacle, increasing the noise, entertainment--I don't want to be an actor or producer. 

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?

I'm associated with ecopoetics, and a continual concern in my writing is exploring the relations between internal human and "external"--even in finding new language or subverting old language or modifying present language to better hold the complexities of where our selves intersect that which is around us, and also change--how to change the destruction that our systematic existences is causing to our greater environment and fellow species. I find the language around "nature" so deficient and unwieldy--even the word "nature" itself is a loaded term, to the point it is repellent. Stepping outside English (this is where translation is helpful) helps me understand that there can be different ways of wording how we be within what we be in so that we're not so extractive and exploitative of us/all around/our continuum of self to world. I also want to protect words from misuse or cliché--for instance, the words "resiliency" or "sustainability" have been deliberately twisted away from their original meanings into really sneaky linguistic "cover" for various commercial/industrial extractions. ("Eco-friendly" is another one to beware of.) I'm dismayed to see very recently a few literary journals joking forbid poetry about "trees" or "ecopoetics"--it's like somehow the overwhelmingly topdown corporate/political disdain of and active disrespect for our environment is affecting even our little poetry circles. I still believe in the power of really intense odes to trees in their symbiotic relationships with a vast network of underground fungi and how their roots tangle with each other in what a few very alert and clear-eyed scientists are discovering is a mindblowing structure of communication and community that supports both very old and very young trees in a fierce network (even as they are regularly cut down and replanted in sterile formations that don't allow for root tangles, and they have absolutely no legal standing or human-codified worth/value in development projects, urban planning or land use) and one we might do well to emulate as a necessary alternative to capitalism! So there! To the trees! I am not tired of nature or poetry to/of/around it/us, especially as we are nature (which we say often, but apparently not often enough) and there are so many poems to be written "under that poem," as Lucille Clifton says in her poem, "surely i am able to write poems," pointing to all the horrors behind the false American pretty picture of "wilderness."

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’m not sure I can generalize what the societal role of a writer really is, but I do see my own role as a questioner and maybe, like Thoreau implies, a drag on the wheel of progress (which is actually not a quote of his, but seems like it should be one). Writing poetry runs opposite to the producer/consumer cycle. Poetry is free and generous, and very portable. I also believe in writing lightly upon the earth—I don’t want to “tell” or direct or be didactic, I want to subvert, undermine, question, poke, point out, notice. I really want to notice. Poetry is silence’s musician, to paraphrase Mallarmé. I truly believe in poetry (art and music and dance too) as essential spaces of thinking, understanding, adjusting, being, imagining. As the societal circle of what's "acceptable" tightens, I see the poet coming into focus--right now, I feel even writing these words right now to you is a form of resistance.

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

What’s an outside editor? (Kidding, but.) I give my work to a couple of trusted poet friends to eyeball, but otherwise, my poetry has been pretty much published as is. As a proofreader, I do try to present my work as cleanly as possible--and each comma should be in the space I meant it to be in. Hopefully.

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

Speaking of commas, I studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and our class read through Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" together. He directed us to take a breath at every single mark of punctuation in the poem--light for commas, deeper for periods and colons, and deep draughts for exclamation points! He said it would be “intoxicating,” and we might feel dizzy. So I learned that punctuation in a poem is to mark breath (and I did feel dizzy). I had been pausing, awkwardly, at the ends of lines when giving readings, and it helped me tune into the importance of punctuation, pauses, breaths and the potential of caesuras. Ginsberg also pointed out a natural 13-syllable length to my lines, which alerted me to syllabics, and inspired me to start experimenting with them, including writing alexandrines in English (a selection was published by Tent Editions as Rays of the Shadow). But I have so many "bests," and one of them was taking a workshop with John Yau in the 1990s. He would assign us the most impossible challenges--like sestinas with predetermined end words. So many people dropped out; there were five of us left by the end. He helped me learn that poetry is a wild challenge! And fun. We laughed so much, and I even met my husband thanks to the workshop. But I love experiments and constraints, and learned not to be afraid of them--to pay attention to form always. Form is the poet's secret expertise.

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

Translation is the most adjacent to poetry—I learn new words, new ways to look at old words, to understand how grammar works in a line, step back and into sound, how to carry experimentation and fragmentation from one language to another, how a constraint in one language can help shape a poem in another. I enjoy writing essays, but it’s a different part of my brain—more an observer or interpreter who steps back to look at or refine (or invent) what I’m thinking about in terms of poetry. Writing essays on poets or poetics helps me think through what I'm doing and why I'm doing it--to be an ornithologist for a minute. Essays are also a great way to engage really deeply with another poet's work.

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 don’t have a "typical" day so much—I work three days a week, and the other two are often filled up with life logistics stuff, but often in the late afternoon before I start dinner I’ll take a break, read some poetry, write some ideas down, get inspired, go back to the computer. Or if I wake up early, I’ll write. I try to write in life's spaces--on trips, breaks, alone times. At this point, I'm always writing one way or another, even if it's just thinking about a project while washing dishes or whatever.

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

Reading other poets’ work or nonfiction science/art books or looking at art helps give me new ideas. I’ve also learned to be patient—so often a new structure will start to come together when it’s ready, but maybe not when I'm ready. It’s a lovely moment to write when we're both ready.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

Oil paint, wood, apples, lavender are all grounding scents 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? 

All of them--all very important. I see art, read science books, listen to music, hike and bird. I'm currently very interested in Ellsworth Kelly and how he worked with abstraction directly from natural forms. Mondrian's early landscapes are also incredible--again that movement from nature to abstraction. I just visited the reopened Studio Museum of Harlem and loved seeing so many previously neglected artists set in context and continuum, like William T. Williams, who brought abstraction into urban settings in the 1970s with the Smokehouse Collective. Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney are two more artists I'll drop everything to see. Nature in the city is a big influence: how humans interact with nature is so surprising, bizarre, frustrating, horrific, but it's the truth too. I’m a devoted urban birder, and my happy place is an hour or two staring at some neglected patch of weeds with a bunch of sparrows in it while people play music and walk their dogs and talk around me. Also staring at water, being near water, absorbing all that infinite complexity of waves. I live next to the East River and need to visit it every day.

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

I feel connected to an enormous national and global web of poets with whom I correspond, even if I’ve never met them in person. It's amazing, during terrible times, this intense poetry community. In many ways, I feel I always have a place to stay, a meal to share and ideas (or books) to exchange. Specific writers to whom I offer my work and/or who give so much to me include Brenda Coultas, Tonya Foster, Will Alexander, Anselm Berrigan, John Yau, Anne Waldman, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Jennifer Firestone, Rachel Levitsky, Edwin Torres, E.J. McAdams, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Lee Ann Brown, Peter Gizzi, Hoa Nguyen, Daniel Bouchard, Kay Prevallet, many others. People I've never or rarely met, but whose work I love: Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, Ed Roberson. Writers who have passed, but I think of them as community: Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, James Schuyler, Lucille Clifton, John Clare, the writers of the Wen Xuan, Tu Fu. French writers: Michèle Métail, Olivier Brossard, Mallarmé, Apollinaire. John Ashbery is perhaps my perennial and primal maître de poesie. (This is an incomplete list!)

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

I would love to swim around Manhattan, or at least swim the stretch of the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.

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 was early an ecological activist—I canvassed for NYPIRG at 16 (my first real job) and interned with them for my senior year at high school, so I learned a lot about activism and ecology, but I didn't quite realize how "new" ecology was as an actual career field. I applied to colleges intending to somehow study ecology, but hardly any college had majors in it (yet). So I went to college as a geology major, which, as soon as I found out I had to take math, I ditched. And then, I discovered poetry.

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

The fact that I became a poet is still somewhat of a mystery to my family, my friends and myself. My best friend from high school still laughs about what a terrible writer I was--I'd literally finish writing my grammar- and punctuation-free term papers as the teacher called on me to hand them in. However, I had a poetry teacher in college who was a poet himself and made it possible to think of being one too. Our aesthetics were very different, but he gave us newly published books by living poets to read and took us to readings, which made poetry feel immediate. And he helped me work on my grammar, to be serious about language. I don't remember ever making a conscious choice to "be" a poet. All of a sudden I was one, and I've continued to be one since.

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

I just finished Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowning, which is a lesson in acknowledging the full bitter horrors of the past (and present) while offering incredible, generous love outward to the reader and to the natural world. As for movies, I loved "Sinners." Still unpacking so much of it in my mind.

20 - What are you currently working on? 

I am thinking lately that I have way too many projects and ideas that maybe need to come together at some point. So. I'm working on poems called "Circles for Wheelmakers," that I think of somewhat as offerings outwards to the poets. The title comes from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's utopian design for a saltworks, La Saline Royale, in which each building reflects the labor of the occupants (the sex workers' building is as you might guess). I visited the saltworks in France a few years ago, and it's remote, but as Orkney Island residents say, "Remote from what?" Half of it was built, with the other half devoted to various ecological experiments, and I got so much poetic material from the experience, part of which was recently published by Insurance Editions as The Light Factory, a collaboration with my mother, the painter Suzan Frecon.

I also have a series on the various iterations of the color blue, and grief, and loss--I don't want to say too much about it yet because to paraphrase it makes it sound trite, and I want to get deeper into it first and figure out what structure is going to hold it (them) eventually. A major challenge of poetry is to enter something thought of as "done," and to find a new approach. Like Stein with the rose. 

During Covid, I started a series of what I'm calling spiral sonnets. I'd begin a sonnet, and then introduce a violent volta--a hand-drawn spiral into the 7th line--to see where that intervention would push the sonnet. I liked detaching the beginning from the end physically, and with such a direct push of the hand. Now that we're back in what feels a tightening spiral, in which our beginnings are being forced around to look at our end, I'd like to return to those sonnets.

I'm working on a translation from French of Oliver Brossard's first book, Let, part of which is in a complicated constraint based on Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath. It's a great way to get deeply into Brossard's work and also Ashbery's. 

I also have a project on simmer--it's a big project, written during the destruction of my local park for a "resiliency" flood control project. I wrote so much of it in total anger and disillusionment that it's just sort of sitting there. I'm not ready to revise it, but I think about it all the time. It hasn't found its title yet--it started as East River Park, then changed to No Trees, and now I'm thinking Intentional Beauty (a term used in park design and urban planning).

During a residency this summer--my first in 20 years--I started a long, thin poem coming out of an achy body (there's something wrong with my foot, and now my hip...) walking and lying on hard glacial boulders by the ocean, and what voice is used to convey that--again, the self existing within a space, and how the self conveys--or exits itself to bring itself to others, maybe. Right now it's titled Without Charisma, which doesn't quite fit, but it might as it evolves. Anyway, that's the newest baby, and it's kind of different, so we'll see where it goes, other than into yet another drawer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Marcella Durand, A Winter Triangle

 

In time of strange effusion, is it allowed
to count to 12 again or must I conform to
beat of 8, deemed most effective to convey
within medium of letters following one after
another doubled beat of heart before escaping
past reach of bran: but who says brain, furrowed
with infinite folds, can’t follow 12 syllable past end

 

  

 

of line into misty realms, who says gray can’t be
million shades of water, cloud and winter, who says
winter is not warmer now in changing skies, who
says every shade of color isn’t more attractive than
monotones that dull our eyes and train our tongues to
beats that end before brain and much less heart begin? (“automata of a perpetual flute”)

I’m attempting to catch up on my reading of American poet Marcella Durand’s work, having recently attended The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Jennifer Firestone; MIT Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but still very behind on her numerous other titles, such as Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem, 2008), Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021). As part of this attempt, I’ve been moving through her latest, the book-length lyric suite A Winter Triangle (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2025). Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, as selected by Srikanth Reddy [see my review of one of his recent here], A Winter Triangle is a collection composed and constructed as a kind of book-length constellation across boundless space. “now is the time to gesture toward a triangle,” she writes, to open the third section, “a winter triangle,” “a cold triangle not just because it appears / during the winter but / because it is in space very cold / and yet for seconds people seem to survive [.]” Across a triptych of extended sections, A Winter Triangle writes out a lyric expansiveness, large enough that, at times, one can’t see the edge. “is of the north,” begins the poem “Septentrional,” a poem named for a form she’s developed across this collection, “is of the seven stars of / Ursa Major: earth turns north / to constellation—turns to / forests, desert tundra and / settlements, darkness of / land contrasted with sea.” As the back cover provides, A Winter Triangle

[…] explores poetic space and forms amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or “points,” like its namesake asterism this collection is inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s idea of composting poetry from the “senseless splendor” of the skies, as well as the designs for automata by twelfth-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

As Srikanth Reddy writes as part of his “Foreword” to the collection: “Like Paradise Lost and Un coup de dés, Durand’s extraordinary book transports us to a realm ‘where numbers end. / And begin again.’ One name for this ‘where’ might be God. Or mathematics. Or another, with apologies to Rimbaud, might oneself. ‘One has a chance to transform into zero,’ Durand observes, ‘if one takes oneself away from one.’” Across sections “automata of a perpetual flame,” “Septentrional” and “a winter triangle,” Durand writes her lyric around a particular shape, around the shape of an idea, attending facts and perspectives across a pinpoint of sequenced language. “Poetry is silence’s / musician and in // painting corners / malachite against // vermillion,” the poem “what noise of circles” begins, “while / orange springs.” It is fascinating the scope, the scale, of this collection; not just how her lyric outlines an idea but a lyric that writes out, around and through her subject, allowing the umbrella as a kind of touchstone, beyond which all other possibilities might find ground. Or, as poem “the etiquette of scribes” reads:

Understand the proportion of one letter to another
and of your emotion in proportion to mine; this selfishness
is intolerable! I deserve better missive, or an apology
the depth of an ocean comprised of centuries
of hurricanes of tears, oceanic sobbing and contrition,
clouds eternally closing over the globe, hunkering
down in an earth of mud sinking into its own regret
over having treated me so very badly!

José Felipe Alvergue, scenery, a lyric

 

The fiction moves in where the absence of real reckoning
leaves a space unaccommodated with the words
                                                                        we have
                                                                        for naming the
exertion taking place there. The commons.

Wisconsin poet José Felipe Alvergue’s [see his ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] third full-length poetry title—after gist : rift : drift : bloom (Further Other Book Works, 2015) and precis (Omnidawn, 2017)—is scenery, a lyric (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2020), a book-length layering of text, akin, visually, to a scrapbook of archives, notes and effects. Utilizing language and language structure as the poem’s driving force, scenery, a lyric is an expansive, structural collage of text that writes on systematic racism, slavery and the prison industrial complex. “The convict becomes recollection, which labor / gives over to the grammatical. A body is bent and / turned weight on the shovel, a muscle pulls an arc / an extension at the hoe, the hammer.” Alvergue writes on an America torn between the ideals it claims to hold and the divisions of class and race, holding entire swaths of its own population as “other.” As he writes: “to what extent is his race the marker / of a consciousness, adaptive with the / world that springs in a cycle—history / and repetition and discipline—when / it has yet to be forced into position [.]” Alvergue’s is a lyric of investigation, composing sections on “CONVICT LEASING,” “RIOT,” “LYRIC” and “SENESCENCE,” attempting to articulate a lineage of long-held structures deliberately constructed or even repurposed to hold down and back and percentage of the population. He writes through an American history both foundational and contemporary, and the impact it can’t help but have upon not only his experience, but that of his children as well:

My son’s voice at times, pressing as it does to the limits of his body, is an investigation. How far will ribs expand. What is his. Who is it that is that his. Who is the one feeling skin stretch or the bones move. A word without contrast fills the rooms during his research. Like a cheek, or greasy finger imprinted against windows facing the street. Fills the smallest spaces between fur on cats, surprised by how voice might travel like fingers along their spines. His language is a filling that seems to not end until spontaneously consonants break the song of a voice. One that until then was the universe itself.

Alvergue arranges and breaks the edges of text via visual collage as well, akin to the work of Susan Howe, offering aesthetic overlay and overlap to denote breaks and contradiction. Through Alvergue, we see how language holds and breaks apart, from the language of legislation to one of empathy and compassion, two sides often set in direct opposition. “Despite my aesthetic obsession,” he writes, “I / don’t think there is a we who can / theorize genre without also what / sounds out after all the study. / What resonates and is systemica / lly real no matter what. The beats / following the disclosure of the / clearly sung cannot be archived / without the speed of capture. / Such a poetics would give form / to the collaborative, cooperative / speech from scenery as an act / against the humming of continu / ity. Such a poetics is elusive.” He writes of the conflict between legislation, human considerations and theory, writing the American Civil War to more recent events in Charlottesville, layering a legacy of division and racist action that culture has not yet been able to move beyond. There are no easy answers in Alvergue’s texts, yet it is the process of his very investigation that requires the reader’s attention. As he writes:

When a system has stopped
asking to be fed. This is a
death. There is a word for it,
senescence. Which is,
I think,
equal parts literal and
metaphorical. There is
a senescence to
any scenery looked upon.

 

Sarah Mangold, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners

 

They put our body
into the text

and there we are
made to wonder

how far in
we have gone

Make us exclaim
in the space

of hissing
throat clearing

explicit instructions
how to look natural

I am very pleased to finally see Washington State poet Sarah Mangold’s latest, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2021). I was first made aware of this particular project back in 2014, through her stunning chapbook The Goddess Can Be Recognized By Her Step (Dusie, February 2014) [see my review of such here], and had long been eager to see how the full project might eventually play out. The author of numerous other chapbooks over the years (including multiple by above/ground press, two of which—Birds I Recall and A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert—also fall into this new collection), Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is Mangold’s fourth full-length collection, following Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Giraffes of Devotion (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. The winner of the “Poets Out Loud Prize,” and published as such, contest judge Cynthia Hogue offers a meaty foreword to the new work, writing:

Reading the lines above, drawn from Sarah Mangold’s austere, book-length meditation on gender, art, and natural history, I am struck again by what compels me about this collection. The volume radiates with incisive insight. The power of its “arrested moments,” the collages of thought and image in this lyric long poem, is cumulative. Here and there among passages of careful erasure and resonant assemblage are direct statements, scraps of fact that Mangold has mined from her material, which leap out at a reader, fresh and startling. She spent years researching natural history texts, seeking traces of early women naturalists whose record of works had been erased. Since historians do not “see women,” as Mangold observes at one point, we must ourselves seek what has been overlooked, in order to comprehend how gender affects perspectives on nature and history.

Mangold’s work has long favoured the expansive, book-length project constructed out of lyric fragments and the spaces that surround them, assembling scraps and silences, and both notebook and archival salvage. Through this new collection, Mangold explores the lost research of a variety of scientists across natural history texts, writing the spaces around and through the work of women in those fields so often ignored. “What interested me was / the way ladies survive / as acknowledgments,” she writes early on in the collection, “in other people’s prefaces / the way historians will not / see women in the museum / unless she seeks them out / a catalogue of eighty thousand cards / on the family Gramineae [.]” The blurb for the book by Rae Armantrout suggests this work has a kinship to that of the work of Susan Howe, but I’d suggest there’s almost an element of Lorine Niedecker as well, albeit through Niedecker’s salvaging/repurposing her own research (as opposed to another’s) into the carved extractions that became her Lake Superior (1968). Still, both projects employ the light touch and the deep foundation, writing out an extended structure of seemingly-loose strands of lyrics, floating above an incredibly solid earth. As she writes to open her extensive notes at the back of the collection (which includes multiple bibliographical sources): “The language in this poem was collected through conversations with books, and the process of wreading, erasure, and collage. A list of source texts, infatuations, and inspirations is included here, with particular indebtedness to Rachel Polquin’s The Breathless Zoo, found by chance at Powell’s Books.”

Mangold’s purpose through unfurling elements of these historical texts is one not only of salvage but reclamation, offered as lyric assemblage of a document to acknowledge so much work that had otherwise been ignored. “In the Department of Birds,” she writes, “we welcome / the possible. Accuracy is more-or-less // proposition. Low down and close up. / An architect in need of work. During // the next five years Mrs. Morrill painted / African landscapes never seen. To create // a message for the future. To prepare / for her coming tasks.” She writes as salvage, but offers her poems not as pure documents, but as quilts composed from the language of her chosen texts, offering up possibilities around and through a variety of texts utilizing scientific jargon and description, repurposed as a kind of lyric examination of these women and their works. In her December 2016 “Spotlight,” writing on the manuscript which was then very much still in-progress, she offered up a pastoral that is concurrently anti-pastoral, writing:

I have always disliked nature writing. Its pervasive gendered and romantic notions of nature as the “other” seemed to include me as “other.” As a poet living in the Pacific Northwest, I am often asked if Nature inspires my poems — only to be met with sighs of disbelief when I say I mostly write in conversation with what I am reading and about how women appear or are missing from history. As a response to nature writing, I found myself mining natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s in an attempt to meld the gendered reveries typically found in the pastoral frame with the actual bodies of women, animals and landscape.