A woman is driving across America. She has experienced a fracture in her life, a sudden opportunity. Her traveling companions: books by or about Lorine Niedecker, Agnes Martin, Marie Curie, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Louise Bourgeois. As she drives, she listens to a mystery. When she stops, she brings a book and her journal with her into the truckstop. From her notes, poems arise.

I imagined case sensitive to be chapbooks created (written and stitched together) by this character. She's not a narrative poet but, taken together, her five chapbooks can tell a kind of story.

 

If a mystery is essentially concerned with what people have done and, in a narrow sense, why, I tried to write the opposite of a mystery.

There is a minimum of plot. I wanted to know where she was going but found I was more intrigued by the sound of her thinking.

 

Ahsahta Press published case sensitive in September 2006. Listen to excerpts here. Links to some reviews and a videopoem are here. A couple of interviews about the book can be accessed here.

A woman is driving across America. She has experienced a fracture in her life, a sudden opportunity. Her traveling companions: books by or about Lorine Niedecker, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Marie Curie, Paula Modersohn-Becker.

 

As she drives, she listens to a mystery. When she stops, she brings a book and her journal with her into the truckstop. From her notes, poems arise.

 

I imagined case sensitive to be chapbooks created by this character. She's not a narrative poet but, taken together, her five chapbooks can tell a kind of story.

If a mystery is essentially concerned with what people have done and, in a narrow sense, why, I tried to write the opposite of a mystery.  There is a minimum of plot. I wanted to know where she was going but found I was more intrigued by the sound of her thinking.

 

Ahsahta Press published case sensitive in September 2006. Listen to excerpts here. Links to some reviews and a videopoem are here. A couple of interviews about the book can be accessed here.