Do I Look Like an Atmosphere by Zoë Skoulding
Carcanet Press
Taking its title from a line in Hotel du Nord, a 1938 film of doomed romance, this collection brings background into the foreground, whether as birdsong that comes filtered through medieval poetry and digital technologies, or the epiphytic ferns, indicators of temperate rainforests, which are neither rooted nor parasitic but draw nutrients from the mist, dust and decay around them. An epiphytic poetics, in which poems grow in the atmosphere of other voices, weaves across time and space to make strange solidarities between places, languages, objects and life forms. Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from human destructiveness, these poems trace material connections through breath, plastic, sunscreen, shells, wires, the whistled warning of a hollow bone or a page returning to the wood pulp from which it's made. In times of collapse, the poem offers no resolutions but 'more feet / another way / to move'.
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