Charles Darwin

What might be unlocked

On Emily Abendroth's ']Exclosures['

Leah Souffrant

What comes to mind when you consider the word “exclosure”? Exposure? Enclosure? Exclusion? Language ripples out and collapses in, as if pressed and pulled at once. The title of Emily Abendroth’s new book of poems, published by Ahsahta Press, is ]Exclosures[, the curious word surrounded by reverse brackets, suggesting a bracketing and unbracketing that furthers this attention to the hinging/unhinging quality of Abendroth’s sometimes exquisitely wrought vocabulary. The title suggests a tight yet artfully unraveling language that is familiar yet strange.

Geomantic riposte: 'In the Dog House'

Garry Thomas Morse

Wanda John-Kehewin defines herself as a mixed-blood Cree writer originally from Kehewin, Alberta. Raised on a reservation with only pencils and paper as her creative outlet, she attributes that hard, simple life with opening her imagination to using words to paint pictures of social justice, realism, and love. John-Kehewin uses writing as a therapeutic medium for understanding and responding to the near decimation of Native culture, language, and tradition.

Orbital resonances

Amy Catanzano
A false-color image of Saturn's A Ring, taken by the Cassini Orbiter using an Ul
A false-color image of Saturn's A Ring, taken by the Cassini Orbiter using an Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph.

With poets using the Earth itself as a mode of composition for textual erasures and explorations of physical systems in relation to poetics, I imagine a future where an astronaut-poet might plant an adamantine sound poem in the icy particle rings of Saturn to see if it could withstand bombardments and pressures from the cosmos. Perhaps the icy particles would play the decomposing sound poem, changing as it decays, to a live audience on a nearby space station. Maybe the poem would be titled after the language of celestial mechanics: “Orbital Resonances.”

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