Kathleen Stewart

Reading JD Pluecker's 'Swamps Fly'

A sonic sculpture of a bronze-cast hand with a trumpet-bell arm cups woodchips
Photo Credit: JD Pluecker, featuring a sonic sculpture by Elana Mann.

JD Plueckers Swamps Fly is a work of “halloing the wasteland” — greeting anew, pursuing in shouts, seeing/seeping pervasively amid the moor. Against the hollowing of draining, swamp is met as the listless and listened steadfast space.

Swamps Fly was published in Spring 2021, and it zapped onto my radar as I was steeped in investigations of Narragansett territory occupied by the early colonial settlers of my own family. Behind my grandmothers house was a patch of woods, now bisected by train tracks and rail yards. Biking down a road called Liberty Lane, passing lumber yards and shooting ranges, I came to Great Swamp Monument Road. At the first house, a sign: Drive as though your kids live here. Whose kids? Whose your? I wondered.

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