Book Description

"Wave Says is an invitation to tune in. With taut lyrics and pressurized white space, K.M. English's debut listens into the gaps, sensing into an experience of time, self, and world as perpetually shifting interactions 'circuitries hot to touch... where the depths are believable'. Through an intensely felt, impressionistic poetics in conversation with Dickinson, Celan, Woolf and Olson, as well as a more contemporary lineage of U.S. women experimental poets, Wave Says enacts a theory of energies-in-presence by collapsing perceived borders between interior/exterior, past/present, and the living/dead and rendering a relational, distinctly feminist matrix of language, history, feeling, body, and space. The poet asks us to 'stop insisting/ on surface' and shatters a field where 'everything signals/ a shadow to what was'. By turns philosophical, political, and elegaic, Wave Says illumines what 'beyond the window an island' might become available if we release to 'the swell that delivered us...the cut part open'. 'What steps through those white loops' is both a question and an observation about imagination, memory, violence, and our responsibilities-to one another, the earth, and the silences within ourselves. Wave Says if we speak the unseen and give shape to rupture 'where agency strips to a pole, as stripping is law', poetry can be a tool-a medium for the universe-wave-speaking back to power with ongoing creation 'the lines themselves a shore'"--