creative work

Arson: Poessays on Rights

Drawing on the structures of both the Bill of Rights and the Book of Lamentations, Arson speaks (as does Lamentations) to the destruction of a city—the “Shining City on a Hill”—and its imperfectly realized ideals. Enacting a conversation between the Bill of Rights, that foundational American text, and the laments of a contemporary lyric subject, Arson works through the contradictions—and conjunctions—of legal personhood in contemporary America.

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Strata: A Poessay

A work of experimental criticism that is anchored by an analysis of Ariel and Chana Bloch’s translation of The Song of Songs. The analysis posits that both the original and the translation engage in the kind essentialism that also characterizes feminist ecocriticism. The critique then gives way to a rewriting of the poem through the less fecund language of geology, in an attempt to redress that essentialism. Throughout, the text is footnoted by lyric prose poems addressed to the tensions of a modern marriage.

Indigo: A Novel

An experimental novel that interrogates the intersections of race and gender in American constructions of legal and cultural identity. The novel follows the main character, Indigo, over the course of two hundred years: her narrative begins in Colonial South Carolina and ends in a California Gold Rush town at the turn of the 20th Century. Indigo’s story is researched and retold by her descendant, an adjunct art history professor, as she traces the relics and sources left scattered about Indigo’s narrative. Drawing on the narrative structure of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Indigo "passes" between male and female; unlike Orlando, Indigo's race is also equivocal, troubled by the distinctly American convergence of narratives of servitude, liberty, and exceptionalism. The poetics of the novel, and the interest in the liminal spaces of national identity, also owe a debt to Amos Oz’s The Same Sea.

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