(About)ness

A mosaic of moving pieces. Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that refuses to stand still. Impulse said preserve the mess of construction, the unbiblical / carnage. This is my excuse for everything. Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined. Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule-infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival. "Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined. Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival."-- Provided by publisher Cover Copyright Begin Reading Notes 1 My bohemian is a legacyof disjunction 2 Ambit 3 Genesis 4 An insomniac’s winter 5 An insomniac’s retrospective 6 The book of salt 7 Freud dismissed kissing 8 This is a reverse sinecure 9 Queen 10 Emer 11 Inflection 12 The cabin is my mentor 13 This (dream of) flying 14 Doula of breach: a zuihitsu 15 Tree frogs 16 Assembly Acknowledgments