Living Room (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Bylenok, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496232364 ISBN 13: 9781496232366

Publisher: The Backwaters Press, 2022

Synopsis

Finalist for the 2023 Virginia Literary Awards
Finalist for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award

Deeply phenomenological and ecological, Laura Bylenok’s poems in Living Room imagine the lived reality of other organisms and kinds of life, including animals, plants, bacteria, buildings, and rocks. They explore the permeability of human and nonhuman experience, intelligence, language, and subjectivity. In particular, the poems consider so-called model organisms—nonhuman species studied to understand specific and often human biological processes, diseases, and phenomena—as well as an experience of self and world that cannot be objectively quantified. The impulse of these poems is to slow down, to see and feel, and to listen closely. Language becomes solid, palpable as fruit. Long lines propel breath and push past the lung’s capacity.

Life at a cellular level, synthesis and symbiosis, is revealed through forests, fairy tales, and vines that grow over abandoned houses and hospital rooms. A living room is considered as a room that is lived in and also a room that is alive. Cells are living rooms. A self is a room that shares walls with others. Interconnection and interplay are thematic, and the network of poems becomes a linguistic rendering of a heterogeneous and nonhierarchical ecosystem, using the language of biology, genetics, and neurochemistry alongside fairy tale and dream to explore the interior spaces of grief, motherhood, mortality, and self.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Bylenok is an assistant professor of English at University of Mary Washington. She is the author of Warp, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the chapbook a/0.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Autotheory

The problem is everything
is human. Where to go from there?

I say I
don’t feel like myself.

I ate a little typhoid once, and the people there
instructed me without saying okay, vomit!

And no amount of listening
can generate knowledge of this kind.

I am, for example, eukaryote
before I am listening.

Mother, I
am listening for your instructions.

There’s a little window in my room
with bars set into the concrete sill

to keep the things inside in
and outside out

and just now the translucent polyester curtain
baby blue as an old eyelid

waves in and out
and waves in

some cumbia from a car stereo
and then a horn, then almost gone

before I recognize it, a gesture in the air
of antiseptic.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Backwaters Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496232364
• ISBN 13: 9781496232366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96