Poems from Granta, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, Rialto, Stand etc. An impressive list
Near the start it says that indonesian has no tenses. In the book she indicates this by using notation like "the waters are [will be, were] rageful", "filled-fill-willfill" or
"[came
come
will come]"
Later there's discussion about definitions of "amuk"/"amok" (as in "running amok") quoting from various sources. On p.44 she writes "i would like a catchy phrase to describe the twisting of a word into a context that pathologies and derides the original cultures of this word as belonging to psychopaths, then forces those cultures to include this psychopathic description in new dictionaries" which she expands upon at length, using loads of white space. On p.50 (yes, 6 pages later) she points out that that such a definition "joins the indonesian ministry of education's/ dictionary itself/ as the first entry". Why is "dictionary itself" alone on a line?
There's much else I don't understand. Here's a sample -
|
'we will corporate-social-responsibility your revolutionary indigeneities and oil slick our way through the feel-good advertisement landscape' [iron and haze care not for how all waterways breathe with human blood as their inverse and keeper] |
I think I understand the intent of the first 2 lines, but why compress, using "corporate-social-responsibility" as a verb, when there's so much white space going spare? Can anything "oil slick" through a landscape? What do the square brackets mean? And what does the text inside the brackets mean?
In "sacred waterways/ mowed down for influencer wedding venues" (p.32) what does "mowed down" mean?
"why must we relay a litany of genocides/ to try to spark a pinprick of empathy/ in silk-coccooned minds" sounds like purple prose.
"there are secret, sacred homes/ hidden in planets across linguistic cosmologies/ (so complex they baffle string theory)" puzzles me (I know roughly what string theory is).
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