Laura Elrick

sKincerity

ISBN 1-928650-17-1
$11.00
82 pages

Each of these poems attends the "dimension in a street" and the variation found there, below the "billboard's traffic stream" and otherwise ubiquitous capitalist referentiality. Aware that it cannot gather the totality, Elrick's constructivism has spatial and energetic exchange enough to convert the weight of present circumstances into possibility, present and real longing. This poetry hears and thinks under the pressure of this evacuated life, while occupying the brink of something better.
--Kristen Gallagher

Never forgetting that hegemony is fought bloc by bloc, SKINCERITY builds a spatial and social logic dynamically scaled from the body to the global. This logic begins with the question What is to be done and moves through critique and a recombinatory poetics to ask Where is it to be done. Elrick's important book aims towards social justice at a time when empire is cracking for precisely that lack--what better place for poetry to be.

--Jeff Derksen

If in this century you are keen to pluck the "little 'plants' in the ballot box of drugged soldiers"--and you should be--reach for Elrick's terrific portable phonology forsenics kit, asking "the historic / multi-task / extravaganza":"shouldamerica / shouldworld."

--Heather Fuller