#ifyouloveerrorsolovezero

In an intricately threaded sequence called “Ratiocination,” Stephanie Anderson refers to “Writing the backward-fracking self,” and certainly her poems can be read as a series of prompts, procedures and performances precisely demonstrating this “backward-fracking” of identity and subjectivity. Here, the practices of archaeology and extraction retrieve a deeply interconnected, reunified understanding of speaker, object and landscape, rather than deepening the trenches drawn between us. We shouldn’t limit ourselves by assuming any of these poems’ speakers are even human; what we know instead is that they move steadily between different climates, seasons and media; they have chosen the form of poetry; they are animated by repetition; and whether or not we recognize them from elsewhere or before, we only see now that, all along, they have been offering us solace in the face of violence. Ultimately, as Anderson writes in “Remembering in Third Person,” “Look what we have / established: / It is possible to have / a conversation with / a stranger.”