Poetry. Introduction by Angela Hume. DEPOSITION | DISPOSESSION: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE SUNDARBANS, the posthumously published work by Marthe Reed, responds to the ecological crises of the Sundarbans of south Bangladesh and India. The work "talks back" to climate denialism, questioning Reed's own and the United States' role in climate change and its collateral damage. Interrogative, defiant, elegiac, the writing speaks to a realm in crisis--the fragility of a landscape, its human and other-than-human inhabitants, and the Sundarbans islands and archipelagos rapidly being swallowed by rising sea levels. Under such pressures, how do the inhabitants--and we who live elsewhere on the earth--respond? Reed does so by adopting a poetic method and collage technique that draws on a diverse set of resources. The completed book-length poem fuses together personal anecdotes and collected notes ranging in origin from scientific publications, the IPCC Synthesis Report, research on native plant and animal species, to discussions of cultural figures of the region, addresses to ethics and climate change boards, and literary texts such as The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Travels In The Mugal Empire by François Bernier, and Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil.

deposition | dispossession: Climate Change in the Sundarbans

Literature & Fiction

Reed, Marthe

Poetry

Kelsey Street Press

Tender Box: A Wunderkammer

Lavender Ink

Poetry. In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, GAZE explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial condition: Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other. Rikki Ducornet says this about these intersections in GAZE: "In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny." What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to "become." Kate Bernheimer says of GAZE, "'Too beautiful to articulate'--dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. GAZE at them; go blind inside this mentalist's mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind."

Gaze

Black Radish Books

Engagements with the Thousand and One Nights, gender, narration, and Sir Richard Burton, as well as other writers’ takes on the story-cycle, Nights Reading muses upon the nature of narrative and Scheherazade as narrator. Drawing from the original story cycle's positing of Scheherazade as redeemer of not only herself and her sister virgins of the kingdom, but of just rule and King Shariyar’s humanity, the poems explore tropes of gender and of the seemingly powerless (women, slaves, blacks) to erode and challenge the status quo. "Marthe Reed's advice to Burton, the Nights translator, is to speak not of what concerns you not. Here the poet examines a great oral tradition put to paper, its 'thousand miles of moonlight' obscured by 'the catholicism of (his) intentions emending her account,' or rather, not so much Scheherazade's—herself a fiction, but centuries of storytelling born of another world entirely. —Rikki Ducornet "Marthe Reed's exploratory Nights Reading writes its way through and around a story that may or may not be familiar, the sights, sounds and contradictions of the act of storytelling itself. Moving her book-length accumulations of lyric fragments through the 'serious play' of gymnastic puns, breath-breaks and incompletions, Reed's quick turns and shifts are deliberate, jagged and entirely unexpected. How does one remain on solid ground when both story and narrator are slippery, unreliable? Very carefully, one might say." —rob mclennan "a major coming forth" —Jerome Rothenberg

Nights Reading: Burton’s Thousand and One

Exploring a tangled, unsettled love for place amid the landscape, cultures, and social and ecological crises of South Louisiana, ARK HIVE seeks amid the ruins for answers—what does it mean to be here, now? Following the ley-lines carved out in the streets and bayous of a rapidly eroding landscape, this collection refuses stability, confident of only the riddle and the manifold voices activating it. Reed’s formal hybridity juxtaposes hand-made maps, collaged language, and altered documents with lyrics and lyric essays: “fragments [from] journals, photographs, memory, archives—time capsule of a disintegrating world.” ARK HIVE bears its loves and dead along the current of the work’s own profligate vegetative urge—accretions of history and immersion, saturations of grief and delight. Tender and monumental, a teeming hive of voices, ARK HIVE returns an extraordinary, vanishing world to the center of our attention.
"There are locations—like Hawai’i, like Louisiana—where cultures are unique to the place, and outsiders are made to know themselves from insiders. As a poet familiar with issues of appropriation and theft, Marthe Reed asked herself how a Californian who had lived in Providence and Perth, could write about Louisiana, a place she loved over her many years of living in Lafayette. “Writing Louisiana, outsider-inside, poles of affection and alienation push and pull against me.” Her answer was to piece together an archive, and to write an epic from its documents: photographs, maps, names of birds, travel journals, histories, languages. What ultimately brings this material to life are the heart-lyrics stitched through the whole: from “threnody”: “I keep the contents of my heart / stacked in wet clay / heavy with downpour,” where “behind the grate the small / eyes of an armadillo / muted reek / of urine and feces[.]” The threnody she wrote was for a beautiful, fraught, and fragile place. It grieves me to write my paragraph in the past tense. Shortly before she died she told me, “We’re all going to die and no one will remember us; it’s ok.” We are here to remember her and this ravishing, important, necessary work." --Susan M. Schultz

Ark Hive

Operating System