This poetry collection engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. Influenced by the lyric meditations of Robert Hass and Li-Young Lee, the intellectual clarity of Elizabeth Bishop, the place-oriented imagism of Bashō and Gary Snyder, and the reflexive, self-conscious impulse of Sharon Olds, the poems tackle a vast geography of recollection—from Kyoto to the Okefenokee to the turnings and obsessions of the author’s mind itself. Using a sequence of date-stamped prose poems as narrative fence posts, the collection addresses multiple modalities in memory by weaving together longer meditative lyrics, shorter narrative and place-based poems, and deconstructed lyrics that employ slashes as syntactical place markers. In testing memory’s capacity for multiple truths, and in discovering its inherent limitations, this collection grapples with the simultaneity of memory as an act of self-preservation, self-creation, and relentless re-creation.
