aboutness
A mosaic of moving pieces.
Description
Impulse said preserve the mess of construction, the unbiblical / carnage. This is my excuse for everything.
Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined.
Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule-infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine.
Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival.
Reviews
"Laffan's poems are fragmented and metatexual, existing in a variety of forms ... the book is one to read, and reread infinitely." Montreal Review of Books