The link between form and content is, of course, rarely clear cut — despite Robert Creeley’s (and then Charles Olson’s) influential assertion that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” — but just because total mimesis isn’t attainable doesn’t mean that a certain charge can’t be derived from forms that echo their subject matter. […] These thoughts are prompted by Joel Chace’s new collection Underrated Provinces.

Place the tip of your tongue in different positions, and you might find yourself pronouncing your Ss like SH. For most of us, that means something about how we speak to and understand each other. For phoneticians, this introduces questions of articulation and apicality. For poet Jean Day however, the term Apicality lends her latest book of poems its name. And while the term Apicality suggests questions about the formation of speech and language, the term also has applicability across many fields. 

Teetering in a liminal space between a long poem and a consortium of compact lyrical statements, Executive Orders makes use of a kind of ludic legalese intended as a counterpoint to the unilateralism of Donald Trump’s heavy-handed use of executive power. By the same stroke, it broaches broader questions about how the social fabric of our lives relates to the impersonal ubiquity of technology today. By opposing poetry’s negative capability — its capacity to flow against factual uniformities — to the crushing realities of executive legislation, the book maintains a subdued sense of communitarianism. 

Why does defining the writer as a dissident intellectual seem so European, or global, but not American? 

The axiomatics of Victoria Guerrero-Peirano’s first poem in this beautifully crafted, hand-sewn collection instigate a pretty radical shift away from cordoning off textile workers as banner casualties in late capitalism. Or of textile work as polite women’s work. “I leave words” begins the first poem.