Description
Oil Spell gathers many of today’s dark energies—US drone strikes, environmental disaster—and asks: what kind of tool is poetry to mirror these violences? The poems in Oil Spell are counter-conjurations, but they also query whether poetry itself might be a violent entrance of language into the world. Oil Spell animates diverse influences—Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, environmental reports of extinction and endangerment, and the Pakistani government assessments of drone strikes. The poems in Oil Spell do not attempt to negotiate or domesticate this diversity, but ask what function poetry might have alongside these various performative linguistic functions. While poetry appears to have a dark function in these connections, Oil Spell also asks whether we might invest language with the capacity to conjure towards other possibilities. Oil Spell performs the ways in which narratives of loss and narratives of everyday joy curl into one another and mutually contaminate. The beauty that results is a troubled reflection, like a rainbow in a slick of oil.
Fang vision spells, absolutely spot on in every way! I trust and love Claire Marie Stancek’s braid of poetry and the occult, returning both to the strength of their origins when people understood and respected how they nurture one another. She writes, “pushes into my head I / fight it then / it becomes,” drawing down the moon for us. The great Hannah Weiner once wrote, “You had bitten a way for me.” Thank you Claire Marie Stancek for biting the way with your genius poems!
CAConrad
A totally polyphonic book, even visually, that is, materials in overlapping voices being worked out on the page in such a way that you see/hear them in contrapuntal performance, you the reader also seeming to read each page whole or all at once. The subject is drone bombings cum environmental destruction, and that is ‘the subject’ at this time. I call this art, basically, really interesting art and can imagine further workings-out – musical or theatrical productions of it. Which is not to say that it is a score, it is itself and engages all one’s faculties: it really works.
Alice Notley
Writing as an assemblage gesture that marries each other, surrounded by disaster: this collection of poems weaves a contemporary word-hex. Oil Spell offers poems as spell as art, poem as spell-bound, as orthographically arranged perception, paradox, and reportage. Sonically and visually shaped, the work is haunted—and haunts us— by what it discloses.
Hoa Nguyen
About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt
Claire Marie Stancek is also the author of MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017). With Daniel Benjamin, she co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo , 2016). With Lyn Hejinian and Jane Gregory, she edits Nion Editions, a chapbook press. She is currently completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches classes on literature and creative writing. Originally from outside Toronto, Ontario, she now lives in Berkeley, California.
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…Stancek (Mouths) demonstrates a belief in the power of cacophony to raise
consciousness in this complex, multifaceted second collection. Like a fiendish deejay, she
mixes the discourses of drone warfare, environmental crisis, English Romanticism, and
American mass media culture to produce poems that thrum and careen across the page:
“neither but both/ and between space of fang & voiced/ flesh-growl bray-sob & BLAST
half blast.” Radically defamiliarized words, aural puns, and altered quotations take the
place of standard English syntax, punctuation, and diction.
Fang vision spells, absolutely spot on in every way! I trust and love Claire Marie Stancek’s braid of poetry and the occult, returning both to the strength of their origins when people understood and respected how they nurture one another. She writes, “pushes into my head I / fight it then / it becomes,” drawing down the moon for us. The great Hannah Weiner once wrote, “You had bitten a way for me.” Thank you Claire Marie Stancek for biting the way with your genius poems!
A totally polyphonic book, even visually, that is, materials in overlapping voices being worked out on the page in such a way that you see/hear them in contrapuntal performance, you the reader also seeming to read each page whole or all at once. The subject is drone bombings cum environmental destruction, and that is ‘the subject’ at this time. I call this art, basically, really interesting art . . . it really works.
//|{invoke _night*[spell]
happened that night escaped from the menagerie
song fragment happened night escaped
spread “ “evil
like butter like birds
wet with blood smacking into glass
night escaping Medusa’s hair into light
like obscene infinity : evil
they say is that
which is unintelligible or [[it threatens to return forever live
arrived what continues
to haunt us a : dream that could only have been _dreamt in dark/burgeon
bruised in somnambulance bruising : impious : holding a book
and a gun the gun covered
in words the book
covered in oil the oil
was riot or the color
of what magically survives its physical annihilation
which is riot and it spoke //
__the borders you recognize will consume you
women who are evil are said to be “possessed”
for what are you searching
bite the head of a live dick
rubs sticks/stones together
song fragment covered] in oil
a new night more dark is take
and what it does place take
in the world places take
over created ungod /night
sun goes out ++with it the stars and happened
masscrash in dark all the planes felled dark downing
masscrash dark trainscrash in utter night
demonic myth model
darkness spreads fucks up borders between things
what were rhythmic and periodic textures of human life
spirit attack : become : indistinguishable : a spectral dimension
similar enchantments among remote ancestors
winged with an owl’s feathers|| holding a book and a gun
for what are you searching says night
trance be on you somnambulance
security camera happened
that a blue horse escaped
like what was the idea of nature
escaped the night
their hearts burned( their limbs trembling
barbed_with a thorn +continues to haunt masscrash
outer darkness come inner everyone
on the sidewalk masscrash cease
rest what //you were seeking arrived already dark pull
spilled inglorious fruit ^no light
yawn of the night
invoke what is already gone
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