Elements

by Deborah Poe

Poetry. Deborah Poe's ELEMENTS lyrically enacts structures and histories of 36 elements. Poe's experimental tactics bring "Phosphorus (P)" and "Calcium (C)" alive with the rigor of a scholar and the precision of a musician. Her visual play is as captivating as the politics of extraction she examines. We meet newborns, labor leaders, lovers and scientists. Poe satisfies our need for story, for discovery, for protest. We also encounter linguistic spaces which thwart narrative expectations: information is presented fragmentarily, out of order or elided completely. Through poems such as "Potassium (K)," "Titanium (Ti)," and "Ununtrium (Uut)," the language of science collides with the language of art, and we watch a literary "between space" emerge: "earthquake syntax of / language and the mind" merge in "thought-flock constellations." We experience hypnosis in the nerve net // hybridization / a closer experience / with the geological body. A continual catalyst between worlds, Poe's poems push beyond the materials and materiality that initiate them.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

Deborah is the author of the poetry collections the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). In addition, Deborah is co-editor of Between Worlds: An Anthology of Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang).

Deborah Poe is associate professor of English at Pace University, where she directs the creative writing program and is founder and curator of the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit. She has also taught at Binghamton University, Western Washington University, Port Townsend Writer’s Workshop in Washington, and Casa Libre en La Solana in Tucson.