fossils in the making

Review of Fossils in the Making

By admin in Book Review, Books Tags: , ,

Madeleine Wattenberg, Assistant Editor of the Cincinnati Review has written a thoughtful and compelling review of Fossils in the Making. Here is just one of the many insights she has into the book: 

The final poem, fittingly named “echo / o” turns on its internal sounds; “o” is, after all, the symbol for Oxygen, the gyre’s center, the mark of invocation. The invocation is to anyone—or anything—that is listening. Bagdanov encourages us to make our attempts but also recognize that these attempts are folded within other bodies, that we both carry and are carried by the gyre’s currents. And if our making is an undoing, then perhaps our undoing will be our making too.

Read the rest here.

Interview with Chicago Review of Books

By admin in Fossils in the Making Tags: , , ,

I talked with Amy Brady at Chicago Review of Books about Fossils in the Making and how it addresses ecological crisis. We discussed the suburbs, the relationship between science and poetry, and what, if anything, poetry can do to contend with climate change and other forms of violence:

I think that, climate-change deniers aside, most people accept the fact that scientific disciplines can tell us something true about the world. There’s an unquestioned belief in scientific objectivity, faith in its ability to impartially apprehend “reality.” I think people are generally more skeptical of the claim that art can tell us something true and necessary about reality as well. However, scientific instruments are still mediating objects constructed by humans, and the knowledge they produce must be supplemented with other ways of knowing, as the sciences do not have privileged access to what is “real.” Throughout the collection, I’m interested in exploring the relationship between scientific “objectivity” and lyric “subjectivity” and the places where these methods of knowing contradict and supplement each other. I’m also interested in what a poem itself proves, if anything. Is a poem a proof of thought? The residue of experience? Can its figures and forms manifest what is intangible, unconscious, ungraspable? Or does it merely prove, again and again, the failure of language to close the gap between the world and our own bodies?

Read the rest here.