SHOW

Abstract

"Show" is a collection of poems concerned primarily with sight, both in terms of looking and being looked at. These poems tend find their subjects in the physical world, the world of and around the bodyand the elements at work between the two. Broken into three sections, "Show" moves from a meditation on the natural world to a chronological reflection on childhood events, still often situated in or contending with the natural environment. As these events become more personal, the poems begin to spin out into a different kind of meditation, fixed mainly on various aspects of the human body. Still engaging the natural world, the third section echoes the first, but in a less conventional way: here the poems often take the grotesque as their subjects and find a lure in the distorted and perverse. This course of looking in "Show" culminates in a series of ekphrastic poems.