| dc.description.abstract | Out is Through is a book of poetry that began as a long ekphrasis which explored the Black Paintings of Francisco Goya; however, it grew out of that initial impulse into something more than merely commentary. The basis of the ekphrasis is still there, along with a quote from Goya to situate the manuscript, but the poems have branched out and deal with more recent themes like politics, violence, self-harm, and selfhood. There are three sections of poems named after the different members of the Fates, the Greek figures who control the lives of human beings through the measuring and cutting of life-strings. Many of the poems do not have titles which is to destabilize the narrative and the normal way in which readers are used to reading poems, where the titles guide the reader toward some immediate understanding. Without the titles, the poems feel more foreign, and the reader is forced to take the words and images on their own merit. This decentering of the reader within the experience of reading the poems, forcing them to confront how they read poems, is an important theme throughout the book. Some of the works that inspired Out is Through are the paintings of Francisco Goya, which provided the foundation and impetus for the writing of the book. Goya's Black Paintings reflect the personal and political turmoil of his time while also being heavily veiled in metaphor and symbolism. The forms of the poems have been inspired by Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow, and John Berryman's The Dream Songs. Along with those books, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson provided spiritual guidance for the book through Howe's exploration and elucidation of Emily Dickinson's work and life. One of the major facets of Dickinson's work was decentering the reader and allowing the poetry space to exist on its own, which is the same goal as that of the poems in Out is Through. The alienation of the familiar has often been a goal of writing, from the density of Joyce to the stripped-down strangeness of Beckett, though where Out is Through branches out and creates its own space within the poetry world is its focus on the nature of poetry itself. Often form has been used to help the reader grasp what the poem is doing, but many of the poems within this book have been stripped of that familiarity and the form becomes a hedge maze. This hedge maze effect can confuse the reader, but once the reader figures out their own way through the poems become clearer, more guiding, and more guided than they first appear. Out is Through is different from many other works of poetry; there is a growing amount of work within the poetry world that eschews difficulty, prioritizes personal experience, and focuses on issues of identity and selfhood. Out is Through shares the focus on issues of identity but seeks to alienate the reader to force them to look at their identity from a new angle. The poetry's focus on history, personal and global, places identity within a spectrum of experience. What makes Out is Through so bold is the way that it weaves the political, personal, and historical into an experience that pushes the readers to read with attention and patience. The work has been designed for the reader to find themselves lost, wondering how they got where they are, and finding out something new about themselves. | |
