"Source Codes" is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a 'miscellany', an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour. The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents. 'In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space', and 'Information is dark, not light', the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, "Source Codes" is not neutral in intent. Its appendices - HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author's first book, "Bag 'o' Diamonds" - attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint. Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge - between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within 'slow space' - skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.
Despite high-tech concerns and quips that place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his loopy "Nude Formalist" mode, Wheeler's "sources" in this third book seem equally drawn from the allusive grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line. Taking overblown advantage of these poets' colloquially pessimistic strains, Wheeler's talent for crushing rhymes exposes total disaffection: "You've been pure trouble since I thought you up,/ Acie, hairnet, glass eye, wormy dick/ through stretch pants across a girth so thick/ even your dog don't jump." Wheeler's pantheon of effects, previously exercised in Bag O' Diamonds and Smokes, takes in everything from jingles, tight syllabic stanzas, the odd mix of stentorian modes and cartoonlike plasticity from middle-period Ashbery, pseudo-didactic literariness ("The death of peace is no literature/ Leisure is death without letters./ Death is without the leisure of letters./ A lettrist's death is without peace."), myths, fables, surrealist mantras and Swiftian turns. A table of contents that sources these 49 untitled, numbered poems including 24 jarring collages that are placed on equal poetic footing with the 25 texts is bookended by three appendixes of drafts, clippings and HTML code, further elaborating Wheeler's relationship to the strangeness of "being" in a time when any attempt at expression is echoed back by the circuit-board of media. Formally dazzling and spiritually unforgiving ("On an upper story, someone is dying./ On this lower floor, I am revising."), this is an important, limit-testing book. (May 1)Forecast: Wheeler's three collections have been published by the Univ. of Georgia, Four Way Books and now the Australian Salt. This book will be well-reviewed in literary venues and sought out by her solid following, and it should find her a steady U.S. house.
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