BUMBLEBEES
by Deborah Meadows
Deborah Meadows’ latest book of poetry, Bumblebees, is an expansive and radical text written in the language of climate, war, interrogation, and existence. Meadows’ poetics live on the earth of all of disciplines—infusing her language with vital contemporary concerns. Bumblebees will leave the language of global catastrophe stuck in your teeth.
In Bumblebees, Meadows shows us our world with constantly shifting scales, like a camera with its zoom function broken, giving us the details and then zooming out to a greater political, societal, and linguistic context, then zooming right back in to us again. This deft movement adds to the book’s political charge, dealing with issues of environment and humanity in a way few other contemporary poets could. Meadows creates a commune between the single reader and multiple audience, which will remind you of our collective experience, our collective existence.
Meadows’ groundbreaking use of language is layered, non-linear, and wholly unique. It reads as if her language is caught in a tornado—ruptured and flowing/glowing around us. Pulling from many schools of thought, it warps and morphs its surroundings. Grounded with global concerns and rich with meaning play, Bumblebees is a moving and necessary work. It will reinvent your understanding of extinction, and our relationship to each other, our world.
People Are Saying
“Meadows’ poems are striking events of encounter with the daunting complexity of earthly existence in the climate-changing present. Her poetic language is one of contrast and variation: alternately witty, moody, ironic, melancholic, and critically incisive. The variation in form and mood of the poems in Bumblebees continuously draws the reader into a sensory connection to subject matter or knowledge system: “acoustical measures of being sound me out.”
—Carla Harryman
Bumblebees resonates “vibratory life attach[ed] to skein of star life,” accumulated inventories working up the running start by which readers might escape the gravity of a planet that so weakly holds us. Are there after-lives to be found in the afterimages of our civilization—if not beehive of the invisible, then “nerve transmitter relayed” restorations from “last chance tourism near glacial limit?” Meadows’s lines stitch topographic contours through mountains of thrown out sound, hyphae reaching out to fellow artists, with mycelial kin drawing a collective map of California from the carbon museum of the future. In a time when too much is being built, this poetry, mesmerizingly, celebrates decomposition.
—Jonathan Skinner
For over two decades, Deborah Meadows has produced some of the most intricate and nimble poetry that I know of. No books (or even pieces) of hers ever look or sound the same. The discursive jump cuts in this new collection, Bumblebees, are startling. In a million years no one would guess what comes next, line by line, and yet, when the lines fall, it’s hard to think of the pieces in any other way. These crazy lush harmonics coupled to maverick metricalities are sure to please the most demanding of poetry readers.
—Rodrigo Toscano
About the Author
Deborah Meadows grew up in Buffalo. After graduating from SUNY, Buffalo in Philosophy and English, she moved to California where she taught for many years. She is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo, and has published over a dozen books of poetry, most recently Neo-bedrooms, Lecture Notes, a duration poem in twelve parts, and The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays. More at DeborahMeadows.com.