evaporatus

“Occasional lapses in grammar punctuate a text that capitalizes nothing but “I.”  Unbound qualifiers—sur-real—empty the world of our hidden habits to “fill your stomach’s groan with a charcoal sketch of naked trees.”   When Klingbeil says “gothic,” plotting the reader’s location in space, nothing gothic appears to be here, on this plane: “I’ve confused the noun of this graph already.”  This poetic “portmanteau” is concerned with the junctures of meaning and experience: “I think lost in translation is an ever-present term.”  Klingbeil’s book is more than it seems, reversing Levinas’ contention that responsibility for another derives from one’s subjective condition:  “name a device for perpetuating a recurrence of yourself.”  evaporatus seems a purposefully overwrought way of articulating our old and unchanged and reproductive dependence on the power to name: “meiosis most appears through hanging string from name to name.”  The thread of “I” is tenuous, painted in the end-game of these removes.”

—Jared Schickling