Starting a new year with thoughts of the poetic forward. What’s really been occupying my attention lately is Brenda Iijima’s new book If Not Metamorphic, particularly the expansive space it creates for plotting a/series of biological structure(s) on the page. And not just biology in a limited sense, a sort of revisionary approach to the “biosphere” blend of cellular and non-cellular based structures in collective movement (Iijima’s previously released book-length project, appropriately titled Animiate, Inanimate Aims, suggests this space as well). Where language can become soft and malleable, or rock hard, abutting, but sensous and generative (from the poem “Tertium Organum”… “When she / began a sexual relationship with the earth”). “Metamorphic” : “of a rock” in the process of life, of which the inanimate is a part, cycled through a process of birth, shaping, and decay. Brenda’s work has always startled me in its intensity and integrity; it is a poetry that snowballs, expands in cystalline blocks of atoms, grows antennae, and consumes itself; all the while the author is there but never directing, forcing, or packaging the language. Witnessing the process is delightful (for me, and, I’m thinking, for Brenda as well).

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Iijima-curated eco language reader, a book of essays dealing with the intersection of global ecological disaster and contemporary forms of poetic thought and practice. What is, in part, suggested by these two new works marked shift in focus for contemporary poets concerning themselves with the natural world (that albatross the “nature poem”), both perceived by and shaped by humans; less observational/meditational & more enactive; language mirroring and marking whats beneath, a shimmering laketop and beneath the surface, a roiling organic soup. Anyways, sounds like a real treat to read and contemplate in this cold slow boil of a Phila winter.

If Not Metamorphic: out now from Ahsahta Press.

eco language reader: out now from Nightboat/Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs

also: Brenda’s book of poetry Revv. You’ll–ution came out in November of last year from the excellent “Displaced Press; a beautiful combination of photography and writing that seeks to revisit sites of waste, violence, obscured history and the wild (stuffed) animals living among us.

pps: Check out Brenda’s amazing art/textual pieces featured in con/crescent1