In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.
“Stancek’s waking magic is the presence and precision of an instrument constantly positioning . . . to convert it into something that both is and is beyond music. ”
“Stancek’s language-machine cuts and splices normative syntax into sparkling patterns, juxtaposing clarity with a marvelous opacity, an opacity that gives her language reflective properties.”
“To read WYRD] BIRD is to become its student. This book serves a deeper need: to let us behold the wound, our helpless openness, that lets us love the world that wounds us all the more dearly for bearing its mark.”
“WYRD] BIRD immerses us in a world of disproportionate amounts of pain and beauty. Stancek has a careful, gorgeous eye and ear, and her lines will make you stop in your tracks.”
Oil Spell gathers many of today’s dark energies—US drone strikes, environmental disaster—and asks: what kind of tool is poetry to mirror these violences? Oil Spell animates diverse influences—Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, environmental reports of extinction and endangerment, and the Pakistani government assessments of drone strikes. Oil Spell performs the ways in which narratives of loss and narratives of everyday joy curl into one another and mutually contaminate. The beauty that results is a troubled reflection, like a rainbow in a slick of oil.
“A totally polyphonic book, even visually, that is, materials in overlapping voices being worked out on the page in such a way that you see/hear them in contrapuntal performance, you the reader also seeming to read each page whole or all at once. The subject is drone bombings cum environmental destruction, and that is ‘the subject’ at this time. I call this art, basically, really interesting art and can imagine further workings-out—musical or theatrical productions of it. Which is not to say that it is a score, it is itself and engages all one’s faculties: it really works. ”
“Fang vision spells, absolutely spot on in every way! I trust and love Claire Marie Stancek’s braid of poetry and the occult, returning both to the strength of their origins when people understood and respected how they nurture one another. She writes, ‘pushes into my head I / fight it then / it becomes,’ drawing down the moon for us. The great Hannah Weiner once wrote, ‘You had bitten a way for me.’ Thank you Claire Marie Stancek for biting the way with your genius poems!”
“Writing as an assemblage gesture that marries each other, surrounded by disaster: this collection of poems weaves a contemporary word-hex. OIL SPELL offers poems as spell as art, poem as spell-bound, as orthographically arranged perception, paradox, and reportage. Sonically and visually shaped, the work is haunted—and haunts us—by what it Discloses.”
““There in muck & marl we formed a hole by rooting,” Claire Marie Stancek testifies early in this extraordinary work, casting a sly eye at the title. Mouths? “Open open gaping. Pits, Caves, Wells, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, and shades of death. Entrance to Hell.” MOUTHS itself’s an exacting psychophysical travelogue having within its scope all the clucking brown water in the world, complete with moths, crows, fat spiders, “a face shaped like a face staring back,” and every one a life. Itself suspended in a threatening sea of rimes, MOUTHS is elemental—a descent through the traces and tinctures that are the floating edges of the world. Mouths? “Strange kisses,” devourings, those rimes, flowerings, and bottomless hungers (or, as Stancek warns late, “hunger a pose of pure intent”). Mouths? It calls the names of the people it’s in conversation with—Keats, Li’l Wayne, Miley Cyrus, Alice Munro, others—and then mouths divinations. Muck, marl, mouth, moth, moil. Oh, but this book is such a telling!”
“Activist aesthetic practices, as they unfold in the context of contemporary social and environmental precariousness, demand more than a radical rethinking of assumptions. As Claire Marie Stancek insists, in her brilliant inaugural poetic project MOUTHS, activist art demands that we challenge the reliability of common sense. She begins by demanding that we expand our understanding of who and what produces that sense, who and what coexist in ongoing commonality. And she does this to devastating, as well as invigorating, effect. Sense and life are coexistent, and perhaps synonymous. But then senselessness and lack of life must abound at the same time. Amatory sucking and murderous sucking can’t be independent of each other. Perhaps this is fine: perhaps we cannot love without knowing of its dangers. Stancek goes further, proposing that we cannot love humanity without loving far beyond the human sphere, loving the nanosystems and macrocontexts on which love depends. Or perhaps we cannot love at all. Meanwhile, beauty prevails. MOUTHS does not eschew anguish, but it abounds in beauty—uncommon beauty, but beauty that invites us to an ever broader commonality, and an ever better sense.”
“What a pleasure it is to encounter a new poetic voice writing out of a practice of reading and being delighted in reading, but also being fully embodied in the poem, responding to John Clare, Sylvia Plath, and Lisa Robertson in the same stroke. Startle and delight, spicy and monstrous; the coolness of these poems lies in their warmth. Even the aching feels angled and upward.”
A collection of work by innovative Australian poets whose work shares an interest in “a primary art of transformation in language” (from the introduction). All contributors traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area in April 2016 to participate in a four-day meeting with similarly-committed U.S.-based poets. The title of the event is also that of the anthology, which its editors intend as an extension and prolongation of the April gathering. ACTIVE AESTHETICS brings news across the Pacific and across the equator of Australia's current radical poetry and poetics. As is true of new poetry in the US, much of the work here reflects the complexity and urgency of political thinking within the aesthetic sphere.
Contributors: Pam Brown, a.j. carruthers, Bonny Cassidy, Stuart Cooke, Ali Cobby, Chris Edwards, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch, elena gomez, Matthew Hall, Natalie Harkin, Marty Hiatt, Fiona Hile, Jill Jones, Nick Keys, Sam Langer, Kate Lilley, Astrid Lorange, Kent MacCarter, Philip Mead, Peter Minter, Ella O'Keefe, Luke Patterson, Gig Ryan, Amanda Stewart, John Tranter, Ann Vickery, Corey Wakeling, Jessica Wilkinson, R D Wood, and Ouyang Yu.