Post Everything

Abstract

This is a collection of poems that are confrontations with the self – the self as a vessel of memory (hence the “Post” in the title, in addition to its double-meaning of “Post,” as in online self-revelation), as writer, as mother of a young child, as wife, as lover, writer, psyche, self-reflexive animal. The voice is private, heightened, direct, and colloquial, engaging in unexpected imagery, figurative language, and grammatical-play, and drawing from all levels of language and culture. The poems often record the process of trying to untangle the complexity of the self at the moment of writing, and they incorporate the particulars of the moment of writing, or associations at the moment of writing, as scaffolding for self-reflection. They are philosophical in a personal sense. Some of areas of concern explored or touched on in the poems include place, privilege, God, music, contradiction, ambivalence, the intersections of pain and pleasure, family, community, isolation, connection/disconnection, romantic love, gender, sexuality, victimization, morality language, and depression, but most of all, the state and degree and struggle for self-awareness vis-à-vis these issues. Most of these poems come through a self or a self-persona, and that self is a sensitive, even volatile character – through childhood, adolescence, marriage & martial separation, and motherhood. Often, in these poems, this self seeks refuge, escape, and redemption through language and through the body. The poet also explores form and poetic mode, in disrupted or reimagined narrative, villanelle, elegy, and sonnet form.