Keep

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (DUSIE), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Her writing has appeared in journals like Denver Quarterly, Bellingham Review, Court Green, Colorado Review, Yellow Field, Touch the Donkey, and Jacket2. Her visual works --including video poems and handmade book objects--have been exhibited at Pace University (New York City), Casper College (Wyoming), Center for Book Arts (New York City), University of Arizona Poetry Center (Tucson), University of Pennsylvania Kelly Writers House at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia), and ONN/OF "a light festival" (Seattle), as well as online with Bellingham Review, Elective Affinities, Peep/Show, Trickhouse, and The Volta. She lives in Seattle.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR KEEP

Where poetry meets Zen meets neuroscience, keep maps the magical space of the Middle Way, in which phenomena arise and disappear continuously. Arranged in four interrelated sections,"cartography," "coordinates," "signs," and "prouns," Poe's cosmopolitan charms loopback and echo as dream-like traces of memory, of being alive. Mapping a "sensual infrastructure" beyond our naming, "the way memories reside between now and letter after," Poe's is the music we need now, the "song on the stairs in the middle of the night." --Ethel Rackin

How the body holds and releases experience, how sensory becomes sensuous, how perception informs memory with meaning--all of this is disclosed from the interiority Deborah Poe explores in Keep. These intense and pensive poems model how perception directs us to what matters in this, the ephemeral moment of our perceiving ("Presence flutters why in the meaning(less)." Poe writes that body "and future exacerbate each other," and the reader feels the ache--part elegiac and part erotic. In that tension these poems find an interplace in which "over and overwindows burst wide open."--Elizabeth Robinson

Keep, is both an archaic noun, the keep of a castle, and one of the commonest verbs. Keep is a command. It reminds us that remembering is not a choice. Each person's memory is a vast, mostly unconscious construction, always already there, always changing, that can provide the materials for conscious constructions. Keep follows this trajectory--from neurobiology to inescapable memories to what we can make out of those memories--"every page more like a drawer, a compartment, or a box," the verbal equivalent of El Lissitzky's prouns, a high point in constructivist art.--Michael Ruby