Survival Tips For A Parallel Universe

Abstract

Survival Tips For A Parallel Universe is a collection of poems concerned with sudden change, limitations, and the way those changes and limits might develop and burden intimate relationships. The collection’s central sequence, “Survival Tips For A Parallel Universe: Parts One, Two, Three, and Four,"? works through an imagined alternate world where the human and the mechanical suddenly and inexplicably merge, creating avenues of possibility that ultimately end in the unknowable, the unreachable, or failure. The surrounding poems further explore the nuance of the unknowable—through language both lyrical and plain-spoken—questioning reality and perception, specifically in their relation to memory, love, and desire. Likewise, the collection largely moves from a second person point-of-view to a first-person perspective, generating a shifting subject and a movement toward a tangible and more direct articulation of feeling and heart. While this collection draws a strong influence from the invention and tradition of the New York School of poetry, it also attempts a new way of speaking—and, in turn, a new way of knowing.