erica lewis - murmur in the inventory

Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins
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Erica lewis's murmur in the inventory diagrams "a dislocated cloud." It immerses the reader in residues, resonances, and echoes. A roving, dispersed consciousness haunts relational spaces. The pronouns infuse and inhabit one another — "i'm counting on your lips." A sound-map of changing bodies, it holds true in your mouth. —Eric Baus

About cruel Love I always complain — goes a fragment of Troubadour lyric. While reading erica lewis's murmur I was thinking of this tradition of singing about the absent and disappointing other or lover or version of oneself that can't /won't show up… In this vicinity lewis registers a problem of listening, but no one can hear it, while directives, proclamations, lies and one-sided conversation rain down. Because "the way it echoes you / is to echo you" in this "cage of fire things" there is no way out except "to speak to where the echo is / we take the shape of the thing that moves us"—we follow that shape as it moves through this writing, and are moved. —Susan Gevirtz

"Herein lies the absence/ a strange garment/ in the lines that flicker." murmur in the inventory haunts and sweeps the reader up to move its half told lessons along. erica lewis's lines are deftly derailed and as quickly reattached. Each word can be taken as a single beat or allowed to fuse into pure separate lines of music (allowing for escape). "We live in a place of corridors/ it is true and not real and you turn the corner." I feel this inventory as a petrified forest of high tension, rapture and incision, a trifecta that activates all physical endings. The line is cut sometimes mid-way in order to answer back immediately, truly a poetics of the exposed nerve. A gorgeous and arresting book. —Cedar Sigo

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