Reach: A Poem

This project is a book-length, prosimetric poem that brings confessional sensibilities to the formal legacy of projectivist poetics. Inspired by Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Reach: A Poem gathers a chorus of secondary voices through epigraphs and interpolations that illuminate the speaker’s own voice. This allusive material supports the personal, however, as the poem considers the ethics of lyrical and confessional forms of representation throughout its exploration of familial narratives and memory. The task of Reach, therefore, is to claim an inheritance of literary and familial predecessors who co-create a poetics of imaginative empathy, where all subjects receive care and tenderness in their representation.