Crane

A book-length poem that experiments with hybrid forms, bringing together elegy and prosaic meditation.

Interweaving distilled prose and shardlike verse, Crane reexamines two figures from Greco-Roman myth: Cardea, the little-known goddess of hinges, and Echo, the nymph whose body is transformed into reflective sound. Constellating personal narrative, etymological fragments, critical theory, and meditations on language, the book’s first section unearths a poetics of the hinge. 

The second section, “Delay Figure,” investigates the relationality of sound, the affective capacities of the nonlinguistic voice, and the dissolution of the desiring body, taking as its guiding figure the aural phenomena of echoes as well as their mythological personification. The book’s final section, “Inlet,” is a striking sequence of lyric poems that revolve around questions of time, detritus, and transformation, tracing ellipses of intimacy and illness, duration and ecological precarity.