Description
Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary takes flight from Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates tells us that the mind works as an aviary—particles of knowledge fly around, like birds, and the thinker plucks them down to use whenever he or she sees fit. A book-length project in nature and scope, Karla Kelsey's work pushes against this traditional idea and image of knowledge, investigating the meeting of thought, emotion, and experience by pulling language through variations of poetic and linguistic form. Here the lyrical trope of the bird is borrowed into Socrates' bird of knowledge, and the action of the bird becomes the action of the mind folding and unfolding into explosions and navigational patterns of flight. This work's modes of expression admit of both an intensely individual and collective sense of experience as image and language slowly mutate within and beyond familiar boundaries. It is through subtly shifting repetitions of image, music, syntax, and word that Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary engages us in a cultural and political critique of the creation of meaning. "Kelsey writes what it is to know, of what we become/ when the universe is seen in lights of its generation.... What Kelsey has given us in lyric form: another world, wherein the reader may enter and become awake." —Carolyn Forché, from the introduction "Kelsey builds us a world here as a painter might—based on colors, vivid and free-floating—and she populates that world with birds and gardens and a sense of delicate, indeterminate destruction. And so she rebuilds. This book is a lovely feat, a triumph over eroding forces and the proof that resistance can be graceful, compassionate, and above all, adventurous." —Cole Swensen
