Helsinki

Poetry. This narrative lyric sequence is

lit with a ravishing light: part erotic,

part nuclear, entirely mutagenic,

dangerously Sublime. From a point both

in the past and the future, from a

narrow cell that is at once the lyric,

the body, a fort, a hospital bed, an

escape pod, the mind, and memory itself,

the narrator relates in image-rich lines

the several rises and falls of a

beloved, a queen, a monster, a regime,

an imperium, a self, and the self's

various selves: as lover, captive,

traitor, soldier, sensory apparatus and

memory machine. Like Dante's La Vita

Nuova, HELSINKI shows how the

lyric, while apparently encapsulated by

form, is in fact vulnerable to dazzling

competing proximities—to Love, to

the Past, to Story, to Power, and to

Obliteration.