The Vestiges

Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which the book is built, “sets out to explore / what happens / to humans when they are reduced / to things by other humans.” In asking this question, “The Vestiges” is a long poem engaged with modernist poems that move from the particularities of everyday life to enduring and unanswered political and cultural questions. Covering a wide terrain of research, the other serial poems in the book mine various texts, from the Craigslist “auto parts” section to Jane Jacobs, from Marx to Marcuse, and from historical accounts of cities to contemporary real-estate promotions, in order to build up an eclectic atlas of this unstable moment. In terms of contemporary poetics, The Vestiges enters into dialogue with modernism, conceptual writing, and post-conceptual art.