Taking Up Slack

Taking Up Slack, a collection of twenty-seven poems, is arranged in three sections, drawing from varying formal and social contexts. The idea at work here is that poetry must establish space for itself at the level of form and at the level of its subject matter: that poetry creates a community, and in doing so establishes parameters, but, in doing so, also establishes sufficient discursive space for reconfiguring those parameters. These poems, then, emerge from the necessarily contestatory relationship between the pleasure of form, which is fulfilled expectation, and the pleasure of form reconfigured, which, through a kind of sly civility, surprises. A unifying concept of the manuscript is that there exists within any form a potential need for its reconfiguration, and that in the tension provided by that contestatory relationship new form emerges.