Iteration Nets

Karla Kelsey

Karla Kelsey begins with the sonnet—fourteen lines (usually) that she’s appropriated from a variety of sources, homophonically echoed, and playfully assembled. She then explodes each sonnet into a voluptuous prose poem, later erasing that into a sinuous, open, lyric line. The aim of the book is not to execute a plan or fulfill a form, but to generate new modes of inhabiting a poem. The result is a work of lyrical constraint and romantic conceptualism.

“Kelsey demonstrates remarkable formal mastery as she follows the path of the sonnet through contraction, expansion, and disruption. Yet this poetry shows that all such articulation is finally the result of ‘an undecided formula whose negation isn’t provable.’ Her intelligence and humanity work a new trust through the ‘secret inarticulate missions’ by which words can be both bereft and found. Using form to relinquish form, Kelsey risks all, taking us to ‘the crux of/presence/sundered.’” —Elizabeth Robinson

“In this uncompromisingly inventive triptych, Kelsey shows us how she ‘threw away abstraction’ in order to meditate on what inhabits relation. From sonnet cycle, to prose sonnet, to archipelagoed pages, every poem discretely recalibrates the way replicating lines constitute experience, its gestures, its enunciative cloakings, its denser renderings. ‘Why cry for trust,/ an undecided formula aching away green lust,/ following every vector toward the promise of the overdeveloped world?’ There is for some of us an attraction in such resistances as to retrace from the seeds of re-inception the very sense of making meaning. These poems offer a supplicant’s reward for delving consciously into the nodal ties that bind and re-invent matrices of intertext, the perfect pitch of genuine becoming through performance. Here, sonnet-citing reiteratively breaks into saga until the series coheres in a personal weave where every line is an echo meted, each gap a double-entendre rendering palpable how knowing multiplies perspective, the way hands, eyes, and mouths speak simultaneously, each telling the truth but illuminating elsewhere.” —Jean-Jacques Poucel