Arrieu-King, Cynthia: Futureless Languages

Description

Futureless Languagesby Cynthia Arrieu-King (Radiator Press, paperback)

Publication Date: December 14, 2018

Publisher Marketing:“You have no future because you are in it. And so, what is now? What does it feel like, what is its real language? Is someone or something dying, going on, or gone? Cynthia Arrieu-King is a gifted, present poet, but I forget her, reading this (and it is hers) account of a world going more and more ‘off’off-base, out of kilter, not like some previously perceptible ‘normal’: it is real, and it is a dream. The souring world is a dream. But this is such an interesting book! The author is an honest tracker, so you never know, finally, what she’ll say, in her own futureless language.”Alice Notley

“FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is a manual for you written in the sound of the wind, in the language ‘the air in the rock speaks.’ A mixed tape of things ‘beyond interpretation.’ Manifesto made all of questions and a very listening speech: ‘how did I get here? what should we do?’ King writes a poetry of now that bears out how language already accesses tomorrows: a simple switch of tense changes everything, like the time traveler who butterfly-effects their own birth. While they hold language’s paradoxes, these poems hold the world’s too. ‘Every time I watch the news I delete a few more poems.’but the ones that remain brim with the fragile power of the poet’s word. That power whose truth still get poets detained. King’s poems work as embodiments and records, laments and wishes: ‘To walk outside at / midnight with zero fear.’ Locations, languages flow, revealing observation for translation, syntax for alchemy, and poetry to be ‘a toil and an art,’ time-spinning and thing-keeping. FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is tender, brilliant play: read it aloud.”Ana Boievi