Zone : Zero

Stephanie Strickland

Reviews of the book

 

Erik Ekstrand interviews Stephanie Strickland at Gulf Coast.

 

Kate Greenstreet interviews Stephanie Strickland at Bookslut.

 

“The Wordsworthian free-verse lyric (whose rhetoric uses print-poem techniques which have been around for a long while) is going strong. But when a poem tries out some new technology, lays out new sets of terms and tools for its readers, actually producing new uses and meanings for the act of reading, is when poetry really feels like it’s doing its poetry thing. This is how poetry defines itself. And this is how poetry as a practice is renewed as relevant, applicable, accessible, and understandable: when it opens readers’ own mechanisms for reading language to a slightly unprecedented but shared capability.

“Stephanie Strickland’s Zone : Zero enacts and constitutes this shift. The language and structure of the book arches its ingenuous eye toward an interrogation into what poetry does . . . . The language bestows real tangibility to the experience of the poems. While the business of the poems and their sections progress, there’s also a palpable sense of levity from a lack of the neurotic dialogic double-backing that plagues some lyrical free-verse modes. In a way, Zone : Zero has the best of both poetic-tradition (the one it creates, and the one from which it is born) worlds.” —from the review by Rachel Daley in Jacket (read the entire review here).

 

“For those who wince at the idea that scientific or technological language might be poetic or who otherwise presume poetry and science make for unnatural bedfellows, Stephanie Strickland’s Zone : Zero is sure to prove both challenging and edifying. . . . Strickland’s keen ear and her quirky wit make for a poetry that is both sonically and intellectually beguiling. Ultimately, she strikes a remarkable balance between play and work, between humor and seriousness, between accessibility and complication. . . .

“Reading [‘slippingglimpse’] on the page is quite gratifying, but it truly comes alive in this other form, which visually invokes the play of surfaces by presenting the text in conjunction with video images of ocean surfaces. . . . [W]hat’s fascinating about the resulting piece is less how it was made (as interesting as that may be) than what it is, which is simply beautiful and captivating. In the end, the same can be said of Zone : Zero. It’s the sort of book you want to keep handy, because its surfaces continue to tantalize, and because beneath them one discovers again and again these compelling complexities that refuse to be consumed.” —from the review by David Ray Vance in American Book Review.

 

“Strickland’s work does not lead the reader toward a singular conclusion derived out of anecdotal experience; her work is about exploring the possibilities and limitations of perception itself . . . . Accompanying the book is a CD containing hypertext versions of two longer poems in the manuscript, ‘The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot’ and ‘slippingglimpse.’ Reading these poems in the context of book – with an implied progression (start on page one, continue linearly to end) – versus reading them on screen with accompanying images and links are wildly different experiences. . . . On the page, this poem’s pleasure is its prosodic adeptness—creating complicated sonic patterning and rhyming—and its intellectual span from a sexualized natural world to the religious garb of Krishna to stars seen in mathematical/geometric terms. In short, Strickland’s music orders her intellect.

“However, if the reader is inclined to upload the CD, a whole new experience unfolds. To call it reading is not accurate. This same poem is laid out against black background, multi-colored text is used, and an image of a large boulder inside an intricate sand garden is in the right upper screen. On the bottom of the page is a string of zeroes, each leading to a section of ‘The Ballad.’ Click on the zeroes from right to left, the reader gets the poem ordered as it is in the book, albeit with an accompanying image. However, if the viewer/reader clicks on the image, he is led to an entirely different section of the poem. Click on the word ‘Achtung,’ the viewer is led somewhere else. This has enormous implications. The poem is not solely a written or vocal act. Rather, it is one firmly entrenched in the contemporary world of digital media—a media that relies on the physical, active participation of the viewer. In this way, the author does not dictate meaning. Rather, meaning is negotiated between artist and audience.” —Joseph P. Wood in New Pages

 

“‘But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone—’ Stephanie Strickland’s Zone is not just a area of restriction; it is one where number and its limits are revealed, where they play. It is one of zero. One and zero alternate in ‘Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,’ the Web and print poem about how carbon and silicon, and life and computation, interrelate. This poem and ‘slippingglimpse’ are offered on CD and on the pages. It’s a delight to have them to hand as well as to screen. Strickland is master of the hybrid book of leaves and bits, and she shows her mastery here, one foot on earth, one lifted in air. The book offers poems on war and Gödel, a profound series purportedly about absinthe, and a poem made largely of parentheses. Zone : Zero is a strick land, a spare, encompassing, wonderful sector where nature and language twine.” —Nick Montfort on Grand Text Auto

 

“What a lot of fabulous word/brain play Stephanie Strickland gives readers in her new Zone : Zero, especially in the long ‘Ballad of Sand (‘silly con’) and Harry Soot’ (‘Harry Soot in a seersucker suit’) with its ‘scar arroyos, worry/furrows, wry sag’—Wow. This is the first of two poems (‘slippingglimpse’ also) that branches on the computer for varied and various readings. The book opens with ‘Constant Quiet,’ a seemingly-sprawled poem about control, and then ‘20/21 Vision’ as centered to the eyes as its topic might suggest. ‘War Day’ and ‘slippingglimpse’ are two ‘boxed’ poems, dazzling variations on the Anglo-Saxon double stanzas. If you're not conversant with contemporary techtalk or the Incompleteness Theorem, you might want to peruse the extensive and fascinating footnotes first as many poems celebrate the brain, artificial and otherwise: ‘A fact//is a failure of two things to be identical.’ (from ‘ The Interior Castle’). The only time the personal is invoked is in the mention of a daughter in ‘Sierra Madre,’ illuminating the entire ‘Absinthe’ series that comes before it. Strickland doesn't flinch from finger wagging at the greats: ‘they take suffering and make it/dangle’ in ‘At Auden's Museum.’ Nor does she neglect the elegy: read ‘Prisoner in the Cave’ and beat on your bars.” —Terese Svoboda at Amazon.com

 

“In her fifth collection, Strickland (V: WaveSon.nets) continues her investigatory hypertext antics, challenging readers with poem sequences refracted through conceptual use of the page and expansive reading of social and scientific histories. These poems swell with allusion and quotation, capturing the paradox of our contemporary moment’s clipped attention span and obsession with information. We find Lot’s wife and Patti Smith on facing pages; ‘the Half-Life and Quake game engines’ in close proximity to Desert Shield; and the 32-page ‘Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,’ an enigmatic pairing of characters and their pun-filled adventures (‘Sand panned speed. Languid was she. Oh seeming fast, fine foil for/ de... lay’). Strickland’s poems have an impressive sonic range, from the quotidian and subdued (‘who can open/ who can/ hold it/ constant/ quiet’) to the unbridled (‘a disaster a pilaster and a jailmeister play/ pool.littlegreen willytadpoles//jasper’). Occasionally, Strickland’s copious notes are more intriguing than the poems’ elaborate structural elements; this is due in part, no doubt, to Strickland’s attempt to squeeze work originally designed to take advantage of the bells and whistles of the computer screen into the confines of the page, a problem the accompanying CD, with digital versions of two of the book’s sequences, attempts to solve. (Sept.)” —Publishers Weekly