AWAITING

Poetry / Play. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023. Paperback, 80 pages. 8"x8"x0.184"

From NMB: The term “closet drama” has been used to describe poetic plays that are meant to be read on the page, rather than performed—but this book takes it to a whole new level. It isn’t composed of characters and dialogue so much as musical shards of experience and memory, a swirling world of phenomenological excavation. Beautifully laid out (one particular sequence is so striking we don’t want to ruin the surprise!), Awaiting shows how a small core of an idea can be inhabited and expanded through the strange abstract–tangibility of poetry. Readers interested in the musical and embodied quality of poetry—and, of course, theater of any kind—will love this book.

From the press: Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangling them into centos or poetic remixes. Through the incorporation of these entanglements, original poetry, and a surreal landscape, what develops is a new work blurring the sightlines of narrative space by way of the spiral, by way of the fragment and the self-reflective slip of the fold into and out of itself.