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STYROFOAM

by Evelyn Reilly

You know how in The Prelude, Wordsworth rows a boat out onto a moonlit pond, awed by the susurrations of cattails in the lunar lit breeze and the poem latently suggests this experience was formative to his later development as a poet?

Well, for me it was just like that, only I wore headphones and there was nothing “natural” anywhere in sight.

In this tour de force of applied poetics, Reilly casts a "clear dome over the fake snowstorm" of human spirit, and sings the body plastic. If polymers have a destiny, as the ultimate Ideal Material, Reilly be their phenomenologist, synthesizing domains out of "the multiplicity of foam and foam¹s conditions," spirit¹s antithesis to the human comedy, and animal tragedy, of extinction. Can we avoid such an Inferno, say "goodnight styrene," without examining the broken dust of our lingo, the abhorrent force of plasticity? Can poetry be more than Paradise with a plastic garden at the end of it? Let Reilly be our guide through this Purgatory of partial objects, let lux arise from a sea of foam. A solvent book for unabsolvable times.
- Jonathan Skinner

"A vast Sargasso sea of plastic fragments the size of a continent has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. How do we go about living in what Evelyn Reilly defines as 'our infinite plasticity prosperity plentitude' and still have room for poetry? STYROFOAM might just show us how to do this. It's a wonderful, mad, challenging itinerary."
- John Ashbery