Iteration Nets
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Iteration Nets begins with the sonnet—fourteen lines (usually) that Kelsey’s appropriated from a variety of sources, homophonically echoed, and playfully assembled. She then explodes each sonnet into a voluptuous prose poem, later erasing that into a sinuous, open, lyric line. The aim of the book is not to execute a plan or fulfill a form, but to generate new modes of inhabiting a poem. The result is a work of lyrical constraint and romantic conceptualism.
“In this uncompromisingly inventive triptych, Kelsey shows us how she ‘threw away abstraction’ in order to meditate on what inhabits relation. From sonnet cycle, to prose sonnet, to archipelagoed pages, every poem discretely recalibrates the way replicating lines constitute experience, its gestures, its enunciative cloakings, its denser renderings."—Jean-Jacques Poucel, author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory