FLY-OVER COUNTRY

Abstract

The focus of this collection is the geography of memory, human connection, and home, an exploration of an emotional and literal landscape. Fly-over country is sealed in the middle of the country and the speakers' consciousnesses. When the external world breaks through, it is in fragments: a memorandum on torture, a tsunami from a Japanese woodblock, a brief surfacing into a dystopic present presented through the voice of another poet. This fragmentation is central to the collection, which attempts to deal with the problem of experience and memory, dispersal and loss. History is addressed as a series of shifting and even contradictory experiences; landscape intrudes and recedes, in conflict with itself and with the speaker, who is often peripheral or disappearing into another perspective. The collection takes as its central subject the difficulties of estrangement and identity.