On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies
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Description
Description
Faced with the asymmetrical warfare, incessant pandemics, and climate calamities of the 2020s, these poems offer no simple solace. With wit, they plumb the wrecked relations between academic knowledge practice and any sort of liberatory praxis. They reject the manic digital buffet proffered as antidote to the poet's anger, guilt, and grief by late techno-capitalism's cultural productions.
Gazing into and grappling with the act of seeing, these poems blaze a path through forests of data and life, the ensnarled techno-webs of information and plunder. Here, the poet allows us to see beyond what and whom first meets the self's eye. Here one may press into the "loam of the forest floor, / the ongoing of those--unremembered / and those remembered wrong."
Though it may be the case that "the world is dying," this book's hope is that we may, at least, persist in a form of radically productive negativity: "Let being and making/be the fullest/forms of grief." Jennifer Nelson's deep knowledge, care-for-the-world, and capacious attention infuse this collection and the reader with wavelengths of bracing and inclusive light.
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies was selected for the 2024 Ottoline Prize.
About the Author
About the Author
Jennifer Nelson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Harm Eden (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). They are an associate professor of early modern art at the University of Delaware, and also the author of two art historical monographs, most recently Lucas Cranach: From German Myth to Reformation (Reaktion, 2024). They live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
--Jackie Wang
"Here are ekphrastic poems that interrogate the poet's own responsibility in drawing our attention to the pictures. These are poems that subvert what it means to write ekphrasis, and subvert and poke fun at the academy in general. Politics, global history, the self-- all of them refracted through eyes made of art. These poems are such a pleasure. I love knowing Nelson is out there grappling with the big issues in her strange, private imagination."
--Matthew Rohrer
"On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies unites, in complication, the discordant present with the discordant past. Nelson's "unison of bots," an ever roaming, ever revolving consciousness is put to the task of recording the intersections where knowledge/material is exchanged and beauty sometimes sacrificed. These poems speak from deep inside the distributed information, they want the last word."
--Ish Klein
"Here, Jennifer Nelson carefully observes "the reduction to vestige / of entire cultures," inviting us to join her inquiry into all the things that a "forest robbery" might be. Are we talking Robin Hood, or extractive neoliberalism, or the theft of human-and-beyond lifeworlds? Where do such robberies happen but in the forest-the burning Amazon, the concrete "jungle" --where we've exiled our unwanted others, our consequences? Yet the promise of community suggested by the greenwood is also present here. How do we live this mess? We must "not misunderstand the sun [must] not/misunderstand the flowers." We can build from "the word barcada / friend-group and boat / or friend-ship" and find a river to launch on, together."
--Jay Besemer
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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