Ark Hive

by Marthe Reed

Exploring a tangled, unsettled love for place amid the landscape, cultures, and social and ecological crises of South Louisiana, ARK HIVE seeks amid the ruins for answers—what does it mean to be here, now? Following the ley-lines carved out in the streets and bayous of a rapidly eroding landscape, this collection refuses stability, confident of only the riddle and the manifold voices activating it. Reed’s formal hybridity juxtaposes hand-made maps, collaged language, and altered documents with lyrics and lyric “fragments [from] journals, photographs, memory, archives—time capsule of a disintegrating world.” ARK HIVE bears its loves and dead along the current of the work’s own profligate vegetative urge—accretions of history and immersion, saturations of grief and delight. Tender and monumental, a teeming hive of voices, ARK HIVE returns an extraordinary, vanishing world to the center of our attention. "There are locations—like Hawai’i, like Louisiana—where cultures are unique to the place, and outsiders are made to know themselves from insiders. As a poet familiar with issues of appropriation and theft, Marthe Reed asked herself how a Californian who had lived in Providence and Perth, could write about Louisiana, a place she loved over her many years of living in Lafayette. “Writing Louisiana, outsider-inside, poles of affection and alienation push and pull against me.” Her answer was to piece together an archive, and to write an epic from its photographs, maps, names of birds, travel journals, histories, languages. What ultimately brings this material to life are the heart-lyrics stitched through the from “threnody”: “I keep the contents of my heart / stacked in wet clay / heavy with downpour,” where “behind the grate the small / eyes of an armadillo / muted reek / of urine and feces[.]” The threnody she wrote was for a beautiful, fraught, and fragile place. It grieves me to write my paragraph in the past tense. Shortly before she died she told me, “We’re all going to die and no one will remember us; it’s ok.” We are here to remember her and this ravishing, important, necessary work." --Susan M. Schultz

210 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2019

About the author

Marthe Reed is the author of five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014), Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely Books 2013), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fifth book of poems will be published by Lavender Ink in Fall 2014. She has also published chapbooks as part of the Dusie Kollektiv, as well as with above / ground press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed's collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest and will appear in 2014. She is Co-Publisher of Black Radish and the Editor/Publisher of Nous-zot Press chapbooks.

Further information about her work can be found at Lavender Ink:http://www.lavenderink.org/content/au...

and at Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marthe...
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mxr5675/ and at the publishers for (e) bodied bliss http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html and for Gaze: http://www.blackradishbooks.org/Reed....

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A touching and masterful experimental verse memoir from the late Marthe Reed's engagement with South Louisiana in the post-Katrina landscape. Reed was insider/outsider, not quite of Louisiana but so intimate with it that one could not ignore her knowledge. Her invocation of C.D. Wright, who we also lost in the last year, seems eerily appropriate. One can definitely see "poles of affection and alienation push and pull against" Reed, and it is heartbreaking. Moving despite its use of erasures, prose poems, lists, and typography.

[ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

unfortunately did not finish—started skimming after i began seeing her use *ahem* culturally-specific vernacular that does not belong to her !! but beyond that, im disappointed that such a distinct approach to capturing the ecopoetics of Louisiana through modes of semiotic sound and expansive field composition was done with tactless thought lacking regard for what words should and should not be said. its a brilliant thought, and Reed had a brilliant mind (RIP baby sorry im dragging yr posthumous opus on goodreads), but i just cant get behind white poets using vernacular and slurs belonging to non-white people (okay like i’ll say it—Marthe why did u have to go and quote the n-word from racist people and use it injudiciously throughout yr text? its rlly not for you bb)