Since the first copies arrived in mid-December, I have not been able to stop staring at the gorgeousness that AUTOMAGIC turned out to be. With this past week devote to some marketing stuff, including social media posts, trailers, teasers, and some recordings, I love the book a little bit more with every gesture of getting it in the hands it needs to be in. I've also been thinking about where it stands within the whole body of my work, which if you go from book number one to current, spans 12 books and over 16 years. That's a whole lot of poems, and I feel like AUTOMAGIC is an inevitable book in that sequence.
It's definitely a less personal book, far less so than say FEED or DARK COUNTRY, which were firmly rooted in autobiography, or even ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER, that wove some more personal stuff in with a larger discussion about artmaking and monstrosity. This feels like maybe a sequel book to IN THE BIRD MUSEUM in its predominant victorian themes, but also very different in its sets of concerns, but also, distinctly more narrative-focused. More so than other books, at least recent books, these are stories in poem-form. The woman who makes frightening mechanical birds, the fortune teller in an apocalyptic landscape, the whirl and decay of the HH Holmes poems. The text portions of unusual creatures...a set of letters between parted sisters. The strange little beating winged thing that is the eleanor and the tiny machines series. All of them set in this same world that may or may not be victorian, or is maybe just an ornate victorian-inspired world floating without literal time (as in ordinary planet).
The oldest poems here were written in 2018 (ordinary planet) the newest, late 2021 (the bird artist). It was a book I was compiling in rotation with other longer manuscripts like AVM and the forthcoming COLLAPSOLOGIES, but was always its own book with its own themes and feel, though there were some bits that were plucked for other projects ( the Mr. Potter series I was sure was part of this project as I was writing it, but wound up being an entirely different thing despite its similar subject matter.) The Eleanor poems weren't always part of this book, but kind of floated around looking for a spot for a while. The initial draft of the book surfaced during the months of lockdown as a much shorter manuscript that still had some growing to do.
As with much of my work, the majority of the book are prose fragments and prose poems, though there are actually a couple rare sections of lineated verse. which feels like something I return to a bit more with each new book, though not always intentionally. (Though currently, the series I am working through is prose-bound again.) I feel like AUTOMAGIC is in many ways the book I wanted IN THE BIRD MUSEUM to be, but which was far less intentional in construction and much earlier, shaky work at times. For all the discussions and fretting by poets over the inadequacies of early work, I've always been proud of that book, maybe a little more so than my first, but felt like it was far more chaotic in construction and sometimes it shows its seams. The beautiful thing about writing many books is you get endless new chances to do things in new ways and more intentionally once you have things better in hand. The poet who wrote that first book, she is almost unreachable and blurred by memory, but no doubt she would love this new book.
You can pick up your very own copy here....
