Scatterplot

Scatterplot navigates a vast landscape of imagination through variations on being lost and found. David Koehn’s investigative journeys allow space for the failures of consciousness and gaps in the knowable as he traverses a sensory terrain through the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. In this wilderness is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California delta, searching through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but also requiring, love.

Koehn diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and his own family into a web of coordinates that form constellations of beauty and tragedy. He moves from the music of the Bad Brains, to the grotesque lifecycle of the Tongue-Eating Louse, to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys, and on through the poems of David Antin and the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, building a fantastical world from the wild realities of the real one. In a universe so full of imperfection one can’t help but both laugh and cry, the poet embraces the present while taking responsibility for his own insufficiencies. Amounting to a mix of experiments—erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking poems, and more—the delta between right now and forever feels both inescapably present and delightfully confused. Immense vulnerability, infinitely odd observations, and uninhibited daring populate the psychological terrain in the poems of Scatterplot as Koehn invites us to join his spiraling poetic exploration.

David Koehn is the author of SUR, Compendium, Scatterplot, and Twine, which won the May Sarton Poetry Prize. Koehn’s writing has appeared in chapbooks and literary magazines including The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzyva, and Prairie Schooner.