Archon / After

A surreal poetry collection considering memory and self-discovery through the character of the archon, the keeper of the mental archive.

In Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site and of event. As keeper of the archive, Kocher’s archon determines what pieces of the past may be preserved, housed, documented, ordered, and reviewed. Through these poems, the archon dives deep into memories and into the mysteries of daily life, and, in governance over the future, determines what will be and should be forgotten. The act of forgetting becomes archival violence, with the archon not only serving as the guardian of what remains in the archive but also as an eradicator who decides what is purged.

The imagistic and surreal language of this collection invites us to explore a non-logical terrain as we follow the protagonist into her darkest memories and find a path for our own journey of self-discovery.

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of eight previous books: godhouse; Third Voice, winner of the PEN Open Book Award; Ending in Planes; Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun; domina Un/blued, which won the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon, winner of the Green Rose Prize; When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering; and Desdemona’s Fire. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo and is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Colorado.