Blood Orbits

by Ger Killeen

BLOOD ORBITS is a series of poems and prose poems exploring various conceptualizations of history both as a generative principle of meaning and as particular contexts and events through which we shape our subjectivities. In language that is richly musical and startlingly surreal, these poems interrogate and confront narratives that encode oppression, violence, and dishonesty, both the "grand narratives" which structure our place in history as well as the stories that we as individuals tell ourselves to make sense of our lives in their dailiness. The events confronted in these poems are refracted through various consciousnesses using speaking voices that emerge from a whole spectrum of narrators, some reliable, some not, some linear in the way their language operates, some not. These events include the years of the Terror after the French Revolution, the opening up of the American West, the early exploration of the Arctic, and various colonial adventures. In writing that is at once philosophically sophisticated and restlessly energetic, the poetry of BLOOD ORBITS brings to life what Wallace Stevens called "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind," exploring ideas as ideas, but also evolving a poetic language that squarely confronts the consequences, whatever they may be, of those ideas in real human lives. Literary influences on this work include Paul Celan, Susan Howe, Walter Benjamin and Elizabeth Willis. GER KILLEEN teaches in the Department of English and Writing at Marylhurst University near Portland, Oregon. His special interests are postmodern poetry, Celtic literature, the poetry of mysticism, and critical theory. He is the author of several books, including A STONE THAT WILL LEAP OVER THE WAVES (Trask House, 1999), A WREN (Bluestem Press, winner of the Bluestem Award for Poetry), and SIGNS FOLLOWING (Parlor Press, 2005). His work also appears in several anthologies, including From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press), AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), and THE GERTRUDE STEIN AWARDS 2006 (Green Integer).

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009