Dragon Logic

In her seventh collection, Strickland continues to open her sense of poetic form to conventions and practices found outside of literature, borrowing structures from architecture, engineering, math, science, digital coding, and beyond to shape her poems. Unlike her other recent projects, which have included digital poems and other digital media tie-ins and accompaniments, this one remains within the confines of the page, actively calling attention to the specific properties and possibilities of the physical book. Strickland utilizes techniques that draw attention to the printed page, as well as unusual typographical symbols and visual displays of unusual textual iteration. The book is deeply concerned with physicality, questioning what it means when the distinction between the material and the digital comes to be increasingly in flux. The sensorial human body is implicated through lush use of sound, yet distanced through attention to language as a formal system as much as a channel of expression. The physical world that Strickland presents is malleable, “a tissue of histories,” and she seeks to illuminate “not the old vicarial/ Holy communion/ nor the older/ surgery/ pregnancy/ sex/ instead/ another way to enter each other to share.” (Nov.)