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Vibratory Milieu
Vibratory Milieu weaves together eight years of writing and the author’s daily practice of collection to build a glistening web of perception and interconnection, including bits and pieces from a myriad of sources: current events, news briefs, facebook & twitter quips, the movie “Carrie,” Buddhist texts, and feminist theory. Hunter’s own writing practice becomes material for the collage as she culls lines from journals, poems written to music, poems written after meditation and dreams, poems written in response to friends’ poems, poems inspired by the Divine Comedy (itself a collage text). What emerges from the field of language is a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, friendship.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 5, 2021
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October 8, 2021The mandala's insistence on boundaries...
What a fun dreamy book!
What a fun dreamy book!
July 23, 2025
This is a first for me. I've never included a poetry collection as a completed book on Goodreads. Not because I don't read poetry. But because I rarely finish a collection. Or really, I don't feel like finishing is the point. I'll probably return to passages from Vibratory Millieu until I've lost it or lent it out.
But I did manage to keep this one in my back pocket and made it from cover to cover in bits and pieces. I haven't been reading much BESIDES poetry lately, so I have to include this just to keep my account active.
But enough about me! Carrie Hunter's Vibratory Millieu is a work of "maximalist fragmentation." You won't get too far trying to make linear sense of any of it. It's easier to describe the overarching format and patterns than the actual content: entirely juxtaposed lines with no evident relation to each other. The meter and music of the words move more often than not, which keeps it from feeling like a chore.
The book is split into 5 sections, and there are no titles other than the section names, no delineation besides page breaks. So you could say this is five very long poems. Although, it's easy to read each page as its own standalone poem. And when the first line of a page is in all-caps, it can kind of feel like a title.
Speaking of, some lines are in all caps. Some passages are right justified and in lighter print. Some lines are in quotes, suggesting (or alternately, explicitly crediting) a third party speaker. On any given page, you're likely to see at least one "normal" line, one all caps, one in quotes, and one right-justified passage. Going through the entire book and looking for patterns within the different formats would be a great exercise for a graduate student, or anyone that hasn't fully digested the fact that they will die.
There are certain recurring themes: dreams, sex, and gender to name three. The first section is titled Lusimeles, a Black Mountain School term with a sexual connotation. So lines like "Sexual fantasy as a form of worry" and "Transvaginal mesh" are comfortably expected. And, as for the second example, hilarious.
To get an idea of how disjointed the book is, here's a passage chosen at random:
We came here before we were born. / I'm wearing Nightfall. / "Your subjects may be more adaptable than you realize." / No seven second delay here.
Those four lines appear in that order. And the whole book is like that. For 92 pages, Hunter skillfully avoids writing a single line that has anything to do with the line before or after it. Like how atonal music avoids any sense of home key or scale.
Hunter explains in "Notes" (included at the book's end) that this is a literary collage, pulling lines from movies, news events, social media comments, inside jokes, other books, other poems, etc... and scrambling them together. The movie Carrie takes up a lot of space, earning the coveted role of section title.
That this exercise is self-indulgent goes without saying. But it's a fun read. You're forced to evaluate each line independently and then move on. Much of it feels like a deliberate extended nonsequitur. When a few concurrent lines DO seem to share some common angle or aim, it's thought-provoking.
But I did manage to keep this one in my back pocket and made it from cover to cover in bits and pieces. I haven't been reading much BESIDES poetry lately, so I have to include this just to keep my account active.
But enough about me! Carrie Hunter's Vibratory Millieu is a work of "maximalist fragmentation." You won't get too far trying to make linear sense of any of it. It's easier to describe the overarching format and patterns than the actual content: entirely juxtaposed lines with no evident relation to each other. The meter and music of the words move more often than not, which keeps it from feeling like a chore.
The book is split into 5 sections, and there are no titles other than the section names, no delineation besides page breaks. So you could say this is five very long poems. Although, it's easy to read each page as its own standalone poem. And when the first line of a page is in all-caps, it can kind of feel like a title.
Speaking of, some lines are in all caps. Some passages are right justified and in lighter print. Some lines are in quotes, suggesting (or alternately, explicitly crediting) a third party speaker. On any given page, you're likely to see at least one "normal" line, one all caps, one in quotes, and one right-justified passage. Going through the entire book and looking for patterns within the different formats would be a great exercise for a graduate student, or anyone that hasn't fully digested the fact that they will die.
There are certain recurring themes: dreams, sex, and gender to name three. The first section is titled Lusimeles, a Black Mountain School term with a sexual connotation. So lines like "Sexual fantasy as a form of worry" and "Transvaginal mesh" are comfortably expected. And, as for the second example, hilarious.
To get an idea of how disjointed the book is, here's a passage chosen at random:
We came here before we were born. / I'm wearing Nightfall. / "Your subjects may be more adaptable than you realize." / No seven second delay here.
Those four lines appear in that order. And the whole book is like that. For 92 pages, Hunter skillfully avoids writing a single line that has anything to do with the line before or after it. Like how atonal music avoids any sense of home key or scale.
Hunter explains in "Notes" (included at the book's end) that this is a literary collage, pulling lines from movies, news events, social media comments, inside jokes, other books, other poems, etc... and scrambling them together. The movie Carrie takes up a lot of space, earning the coveted role of section title.
That this exercise is self-indulgent goes without saying. But it's a fun read. You're forced to evaluate each line independently and then move on. Much of it feels like a deliberate extended nonsequitur. When a few concurrent lines DO seem to share some common angle or aim, it's thought-provoking.
July 11, 2025
Meandering and pointless.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews