| “Mechanical Cluster” studies the human machine as it moves through time and space, and the events that humanize us, compelling our interaction with the social world, while heralding the epiphanic moments that stop by from time to time, as strange and welcome guests. The book is one of journeys and crossing overs, of advances and retreats, and of dwelling in liminal states. In the series of marriage poems titled “Ketubah” for the Jewish marriage contract, it examines ritual and rebellion, the necessary and ancillary components of love. In many ways the book is about “unions”—of competing dictions and histories, about choices, commitment and connection in lieu of isolation and alienation. In the series of riffs on film titled “Celluloid,” the narrator floats and digresses through associative waves of apprehension, trying to find the themes that hide in gesture and tone. A grouping of poems that examine the emotional terrain of Detroit, my hometown, question the authorial obligation to memory and ability to accurately recount anything. These poems often contain references to cars, used as both literal and metaphorical vehicles, as fact and image. The final section engages the work of spirituality: what it means to have faith, what faith requires of us and the converse. Using materials from scripture and books of commentary, these poems attempt to figure out the “practical” ramifications of divine immanence. The book delves into heritage and inheritance in a constant re-evaluation of what it means to be a morass of “pulse and impulse.” The voice of these poems inhabits and strays, puts down roots and abandons, goes West, goes East, attempting to define “progress” through some understanding of vehicle and trip—a lyrical chronicle, a chronic lyric, with a revving engine in the background. |
