I wanted to write a bit more on the new books & objects offering,
ordinary planet, the series written in response to accompany the set of victorian-ish colllages I finished last spring, but also inspired by the faux fortune-telling experts of the
Fox sisters. The written parts of the series imagine a fallen, dystopian, world. What would happen if the lakes and rivers rose and people were left on an island and men would be making the decisions? The speaker of the poems was once a "a teacher, a baker, a teller of lies" but now reads fortunes and talks to the dead, albeit fraudulently. Perhaps there is a little of a
Handmaid's Tale feel to it, to a world shattered and then rebuilt as men desired it. I loved how it worked in a little bit of a steampunk vibe as well, where technology is regressive. As I mentioned above, because of the mother/daughter subject matter, thought it might be a piece of the
feed manuscript, but I feel like it might fit better elsewhere. But the emphasis is more on the dystopian elements--the imagined world where "at first the men were kind." Until they were not.
This is also the only recent project where I was writing actual verse/ lined poems--in this case mostly tercets, though it varies throughout. I feel like there is rhythmic element that plods along nicely at a gallop that offers a bit more than prose would. I use a bit more internal and slanty rhyme in these than usual as well. The form also allows some space around the denseness and heavy of the language. So much of what I do is prose nowdays, it's unfamiliar to work in verse, especially a little shorter in line than I've done in the past decade The lined parts of
shipwrecks of lake michigan, for example. Or the
strange machine series poems. All much longer and looser in construction. But I did like the results here.
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