ECHOLOCATION
by Evelyn Reilly
In her provocatively innovative and innovatively provocative collection, Echolocation, Evelyn Reilly sounds out a techno-saturated world that perhaps we already occupy. She refuses easy answers or evaluations: animals are processed into food in brutal ways and the boundaries of person- and species-hood are expanded and exploded, while new forms of life and collectivity emerge. Bodies, of organism and of text, are ever-shifting, accumulating new modes of signification and habitation. The text becomes a habitat. Ever resourceful, Reilly interrogates “the natural” without discarding it. Instead, she ushers in an Anthropocene poetics that refuses hierarchical differentiation between the ecological and the technological; neither is demon or savior.
Seamlessly weaving together feminist posthuman theory with zoological report with Melville texts, Echolocation is a cyborg organism, made of parts created and found, and exudes a dynamism that cannot be reduced to collage alone. “The biodegradability of these thought patterns” she writes, “Animality in the best sense of the word / Everyone keeps moving.” The poetry indeed keeps on moving as machinery and ecosystem in which the word and the world overflow with a capacious posthumanism – “A thesis / on the river.”
In this hybrid text, a porosity of concepts, bodies, and texts generates new forms, meanings, and socialities, and the same porosity that renders entities vulnerable to domination and separation also offers visions of escape. This book does not ask how can we live together. Instead, Echolocation begins from a stance that questions whether we were ever separate to begin with, and from there orients toward an ethics of conviviality. How do we live in this condition of togetherness, of a borderless self? In Echolocation the reader is given the gift of finding a place “among other fugitive / super-permeable / spokescreatures.”
People are saying:
ECHOLOCATION refreshes one's sense of the thrilling necessity of poetry. Dedicated to “all those who navigate by sound in the dark,” it's clearly meant for us. That includes the whale, the bat, the frog, the river, “the word water on the river,” “(the lamb the god the pork chop),” all the “decibels/of the animal.” That is, the improbable evolutionary bounty we can thank for—among all else—our multifarious, ardently curious, startlingly ingenious human Selves. Reilly’s opening tour-de-force, titled “Self,” is a suite of seven constantly surprising poems at play with her uniquely grave humor, now and then edging toward irony, moderated by piquant specimens from oddly germane texts—literary, philosophical, scientific. Increasingly manifest is Reilly‘s stunning poethical QED, conducted like a lepidopterist’s outing in the Anthropocene: spotting, not netting, paradoxical fragilities of metamorphic selves: selves and echos of selves attempting to locate one another.
– Joan Retallack
This moving book finds the haggard, cartoonish, cathartic, underemployed lyric Self as advance scout, now carrying pelt and scavenging in the Internet rain as “storms of another / Other roll in.” Evelyn Reilly’s keen senses are electric as she transforms the device of echolocation into the primary means for navigating among the dark fantasies of our moment. These poems bring all of us a little closer to a shared planetary poetics, to “decibels / of the animal,” and to the limit of the Self’s shelf life.
– Joshua Schuster
About the Author:
Evelyn Reilly lives and writes in New York City. Her previous books include Apocalypso and Styrofoam, also published by Roof Books; Hiatus, from Barrow Street Press, and Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, from Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs.