Lila Zemborain

'Not like normal stars'

Amy Catanzano

Image of brown dwarf star 2M1207 and a companion object, 2M1207b. The image may be "the first extrasolar planetary-mass companion to be directly imaged and is the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf." Courtesy of ESO and Wikipedia: http://www.eso.org/public/images/26a_big-vlt/

The impulses that inspire poets to think through science span from investigative, speculative, conceptual, documentary, and more to impulses that use science as a form of address to and from the notion of the other. Lila Zemborain, in Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna, 2007, trs.

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Pitch of Poetry

Charles Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, Spring 2016 (352 pages | 6 x 9)

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.”

David Herd: THROUGH the Border

Stephen Collis

I want to begin this series of commentaries on the Biotariat — a term I will use to explore the coming resistance of “bare life” — by looking at a poetry which directly addresses the legal excision of certain subjects. I have in mind here David Herd’s excellent 2016 Carcanet book Through, which, along with Herd’s organizing and editing of the Refugee Tales project and volumes, constitutes an extensive foray into the violence of borders and the creation and management of the state of exception. Herd explores the interpenetration of spaces and languages of, on the one hand, bordering and exclusion, and on the other, as a grassroots counter-system, spaces and languages of welcome and inclusion — thresholds, commons, and pilgrims’ paths.

'The heart's vast and cratered purpose'

'In June the Labyrinth'

Elizabeth Savage

Photo of Hogue (left) © Sylvain Gallais.

Cynthia Hogue’s In June the Labyrinth turns from the meditations on grief and loss Revenance illuminated with tact and grace to the dimensions of mortality itself. The book’s protagonist, Elle, at once a distinct personality and a compilation of formidable women, suffers, recovers, and dies by the series’ end.