KNaR e GaViN

Poetry is the great exception. Valerie Mejer Caso’s poems speak to this exception. By symbolically gathering the remains of her dead brother, Edinburgh Notebook asks us to confront the dead brother in ourselves, just as it begins to form the words of a possible rebirth. Dead in ourselves, suicides in ourselves, we see that great poetry is always an act of restitution by which we recover the parts of ourselves that we have killed. Children of a blood-thirsty God, whose laziness and boredom have been called history, society, and culture—whatever living parts of us remain run through the lines of this book, in its arresting tenderness, its love, the sweetness of its invocation, in the desert my love, because it strives to use those parts to rebuild something immense and inexplicable that was once and is no longer.

Why not talk, ceaselessly, about only the landscape. About our bad habits, of sowing and sleeping, of rising early, of dying before our time? We are this map calibrated to our bad fate. So we can’t just say: Ah light, ah fog, ah grass. Instead we’ll say that everyone says goodbye however they can, blood and the absurd knot together the last words I said to them and what I now say.

From “Appellation”

I can make a house like a poem words are nothing but poems but I can’t pay rent with a name sometimes words all together are rhetoric and sometimes that pays the rent but I’m tired of anomalies what are role models but anomalies

From “Aquifer”

ashamed of this but my uncle logged and loved the owls and another knew the fish levels in the river . . .

From "The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn"

. . . Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot      repair. You thrilled me—torn to the comb I want everything—the ebon bull and the moon.      I come again for the honeyed horn . . .

Our bodies are nothing if not places to be had by      as in, God, she had me by the throat, by the hip bone, by the moon. God,      she hurt me with my own horns.

From “Snake-Light”

I can read a text in anything.

To read a body is to break that body a little.

.. isn’t it only in the bracing and first wake of

loss that we guess most cleanly the speed with which what held us left us?

     Do you see, nothing is surprising but a coincidence. A fact is not surprising, a coincidence is surprising and that is the reason that crime is surprising. There is always a coincidence in a crime.

     There are so many ways in which there is no crime.

From “The Debt Circulation Process” in the closet there is still carpeta. mami asks me if i have a girl or a friend. it is still a suspicious  act to be in love or write poems.

From “Notes on a Derailed Circulation”

my students show up, with their food, to lie down. they say divine things about the sky, the night, and the city. i’m supposed to explain how they killed the mermaids with an educational calm and speak to them of dreams, the origins of fear, and history.

In “Midnight Highlighter”

Best regards! Breastbone! Best regards! Come back pitch-black! My poetry rents me the inside of bubbles.

In “A Life Rummaging through Books”

Like a kid lightly placing a pencil inside a spoon holder

it ends.

I would argue that the steam engine is less of a data point than a geologic for transatlantic modernity .. Therefore, the steam engine is not just a technology; its appearance in this Anthropocene origin story is an allegory for Enlightenment tropes such as rationality, secularism, urbanization, individualism, property, freedom, rights, masculinity, and wage labor.