Published November 2021. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617674 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Vivid with specifics, with instances of lived experience, this is a work firmly rooted in an earth that is itself unstable. Meadows explores that instability, explores our own complicity, and yet with a generosity that seeks to embrace rather than to blame, and through that embrace, to achieve a more exacting engagement with contemporary cultural and ecological tensions. Through her evocative, kaleidoscopic phrasing, we're witnesses to a meticulous yet rangy accounting that demonstrates how language can be used to create new modes of accountability." —Cole Swensen

"The melancholy of a particularly cerebral struggle with the political, artistic self or selves is the dominant, rich tone of this book. Meadows's 'recuperative theater' (as she describes it) presents a broken world with cinematic flair — 'water treatment doesn’t work… people as pulled dandelions, for / mundane weeds, not people (in the manner of) unsettled nostalgia' — and is global in scope, perspectives ever-shifting as her meditations are turned askew by the pulses of the news, her own notes as a fraught witness, and a pantheon of unnamed voices. Art, literature, theater — Malevich and Sam Shepard are just the extremes of artists considered here — are particularly subject to Meadows’s phrase-based, 'disjunctive' (as we used to say) poetry but somehow integrated into the flux of struggle at the borders of empire: 'Where was Blake when we needed him? daughters of Albion living in tents in Samoa, South Africa, Trobriand Islands.' Meadows just seems on the go — these poems describe activities , working with materials , whether of the world or thought — 'How to let go of this world we love to see?' This is an exciting book that should work some magic on the 'theory-benumbed,' those 'vulnerable as molting lobsters' who 'could have been planning nonexistence for all the lack of enthusiasm.'" —Brian Kim Stefans

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