I'm very honored to introduce Arianne Zwartjes tonight.
Arianne Zwartjes's new book Detailing Trauma
is categorized as essays/medicine.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm not sure if that means it gets
stacked next to the five-minute clinical consult
at Barnes & Noble.
But Detailing Trauma is decidedly a hybrid book
of lyric essays or prose poems, utilizing
the language of the body, organs, injuries,
healing processes, and disease to explore emotional loss,
rupture, fracture, and risk.
The book dissects the body, and the words
we use to describe our organs to ask questions
about loss, love, and language.
In that sense, Zwartjes just gives us an anatomy--
[YELLING IN DISTANCE]
[LAUGHTER]
--in the traditional sense that we
might find in the five-minute clinical consult,
as she dissects and separates the parts of the body
to closely examine them.
The book also dissects and separates
parts of language, love, and loss.
She asks us in her words, "How do we live and love
in the face of so much uncertainty?
Bodies age, fall apart, rupture.
Our worlds rupture all around us constantly."
She defines things for us.
She says, "By body, I mean a plane,
an expanse of our breathing, and vehicle
for our attempts at living, attempts
at being, and making our way through a tangle of people
and questions and fears that is this world."
Here at the Poetry Center, we throw around the word "hybrid"
a great deal.
I think by hybrid, we mean writing
that disrupts binaries between two genres,
between poem and prose, fiction and non.
In the plant world, a hybrid is the offspring
of two different species, or varieties.
Key lime and kumquat make the limequat.
Pomelo and Jamaican sweet orange make the grapefruit.
The lion and the tiger make the liger.
In Greek and Roman mythology, hybrid beasts
hold special authority with parts
of humans and limbs of animals.
Last fall, during the "Hybrid Writing" series
here at the Poetry Center, Ander Monson
ascribed hybrid beast personas to the visiting writers,
and I'll attempt to continue that tradition.
[LAUGHTER]
If Zwartjes were a hybrid mythological beast,
she would be a siren, a creature with the head of a woman,
and the lower body of a bird, the feet of a falcon,
and the tail of a fish.
The siren is a symbol for beauty, elegance, and song.
Zwartjes's prose will make you swoon.
But sirens also represent the destructive power
of the ocean that lies just below the calm surface,
as well as the hot winds that wither fresh, young plants.
The siren's falcon feet stun and grab
her prey to rupture and risk our bodies, then smoothly
glide by us with her fish tail.
As in the review of Detailing Trauma in Diagram,
an online literary journal, the fracture
and disjointedness of the reading experience
echoes the sensations of living in a body.
What has caused this, and how does
this relate to that are questions
asked by any embodied person as she
attempts to understand the mute, dumbfounding, and bewilderingly
interconnected organism that houses her.
There is something rhythmic, almost
pulse-like about reading Detailing Trauma, short bursts
of blood in the veins.
This book details the involuntary functions
of the body and brings them to the surface
of our awareness, heartbeats, nerve transmission, breathing.
Again, Zwartjes asks us, "Now that we know about our bodies,
how do we not panic that our heart may stop?"
She tells us, and I'll quote her, "Lungs have no muscle.
The lungs by themselves cannot pull air."
In an interview in Gulf Coast, another literary journal,
Zwartjes talks about hybridity.
She says, "I've spent a lot of time talking about this
with friends, actually, because a number of us
are very interested in work that is fragmented, lyric, hybrid,
and are interested in hybridity in general,
both between genres, and more largely, between mediums.
I see that as very much connected
to cultural and social hybridity,
a kind of breaking out of the narrow boxes of gender, race,
sexuality, et cetera, et cetera that
have been used to restrict and separate people,
as postcolonial theorists have been pointing out
for some time."
Zwartjes's writing breaks out of the strictures of essays
and poems and medicine and the five-minute clinical consult,
and gives us an intersectional haunting, and memorable musings
on body, love, and loss.
I had the opportunity to interview Zwartjes
after reading her book this fall.
And when you buy the book later tonight,
you'll notice that she begins with three epigraphs
from Annie Dillard, Kristen Prevallet, and Ander Monson.
I asked her, why those three?
She said these were the books that she kept on her desk
and read over and over each morning
while writing, the short stack she spent time typing up quotes
from.
She has pages and pages of quoted material
saved on her computer.
Detailing Trauma is part of the short stack on my desk
that I read in the morning as I begin to write
to get into the right language.
I think it'll become part of yours too.
So please welcome Arianne Zwartjes.
[APPLAUSE]