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Description:
Parcel, Sarah Anne Cox,
72 pages, ISBN # 1-882022-62-9, $12.00. Cover image by Kiki Smith.
We can no longer use/ words without becoming dirty ourselves.” In Parcel,
Cox has written a book that speaks to our time, as though she had spent
the night awake, her palms burning, mind afire. She doesn't stint,
she writes as she thinks, a courageous speaking out in the face of injustice
and some *pretty fearsome* ancient texts. Which came first, she
asks, really wanting to know—kings, or cheese? Her answers
have always surprised me; never more so than in this new success.—Kevin
Killian.
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A vivid shorthand to the “living pit”; an archaeology of present
forms (which contain, also, partially, the past); “dear someone, through
my window, blanketed.” Sarah Anne Cox's Parcel traces homes,
wars, and accountings ancient and modern with a compassionate humor and a deep,
sharp intelligence. “there are ideas without women in them" -- but
nothing is left out of Cox's visionary “scratching/in the archive room" her
learnt “sorrow at your wartime chapel.”—Elizabeth Treadwell
Dear _____,
Enter here: the “final days. (before the firing)”. Climb
up and over “there once was a” story and “I am afraid
of stories” and “There was the story” and “There
was this other story”— Here where “I am sending to
you so in transit the past is still happening.” Receive this Parcel —sent
for or not—it has always already arrived. Enter in “Plosistoio: the
sailing month” where Cox plows the sea page using human “syntax/
for human sacrifice”. Sorting the story debris: the wanted,
unwanted, the idioms of telling, the found, the never to be found, landing
in, undeliverable, already delivered, to-be-delivered bins. Picking
our way among the loose shale of Hello Kitty stemware, the language of
lists, Phaedra’s suicide note—among many other “texts
and monuments” unearthed at this site— she reveals
these artifacts, problems, receipts, in the act of deflecting,
deferring to, or never having heard of lyric. Through ancient ruins,
current kitchens, someone’s dreams, Cox guides us over the “massed
and unmassed what is too damaged to translate upon waking”.—but,
over and over again, she wakes us up anyway to the question of “how
the letter works.” sent across centuries. A book written
in the amazing answer zone of “time lag”. —Susan
Gervitz
“The surround of war (far off / in close) eventually becomes naturalized.
The unnaturalness of MotherHood in the Homeland becomes a mass-sensation
more often than not denied—suicided (“Dear Phaedra”).
And yet, through all the crowding that is New Information, comes a poetry
that is able to de-naturalize the terrible sequence. The counter-sensations
are to be found in the glyphs. Each section in Parcel can be read
as complex stellae (King Theseus / epistemology “believed” Phaedra
/ jealous subject and “cursed” Hippolytus / young national
self-knowledge—to a “terrible death”). Sarah Anne Cox
masterfully works the Big Story while recharging the small-of-it-all-in-the-midst
to New Consequence.”—Rodrigo Toscano
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