And for Example

In And For Example, her fifth volume of poetry, Ann Lauterbach considers the ways in which language constitutes a shifting landscape of examples by which we come to know ourselves and the world. What we choose to name is as significant as what we choose to ignore or forget, and these choices, whether in the personal articulations of love and grief, or in the public domain of politics and commerce, inform our actions on the temporal stage.
One choice determines the next, as notes in music or strokes in abstract painting, and the poem is built from a series of such gestures, each of which is complete in itself. "Our Lady of Provocation... whose meanings we can piece together/ from her journals that were torn into bandages/ to wrap the wounds of the dying."
In Part One, "The Untelling," Lauterbach explores the instability of facts. In the long central poem, "For Example," she elaborates the links between the perceived and the real in our determination of what is true. In this poem's final two sections, she invokes a fire (inspired by her witnessing the Oakland fires of 1992) as an image of the transformational force from which new ways of seeing and making might occur.

Ann Lauterbach is a professor at the City College and the Graduate Center.