Jazzland

Abstract

This book-length collection of poems focuses on landscape as an illustration of blurred boundaries between the natural world and the urban, particularly where one impinges on the other. The poems examine human violence, natural violence, and the places where those forces intersect. They also examine our relationship to violence and trauma: how do we explain our roles as the sources or victims of violence? How do we reconcile our ideologies with what geology, psychology, meteorology, and other sciences tell us about the ways our world works? Finally, the poems are interested in whether the human world can be extricated from the “natural”—are there boundaries, in fact, or are these just another human invention?