Infrastructures

Poetry. Film. By turns heady and heartfelt, sardonic and spectral, INFRASTRUCTURES, the second book of poetry by Elizabeth Hatmaker, has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. In its pages, the poet interweaves images of Chicagoland with Midwestern industry's wasteland scenes, infusing them with ghost voices haunting AM radio, examinations of contemporary academia, obscure movies and film scores, critical theory, preoccupations with seedy characters like Bob Crane, and provocative recollections of the infamous lovers' retreat--the Sybaris. In poems that inhabit liminal spaces where art and lived experience become indistinguishable, Hatmaker explores Joyelle McSweeney's question, 'Can the body be possessed by media?' And as we descend with the poet into the shadowy highwayscapes of southbound Interstate 55 in the necropastoral tour de force poem Requiem, we, too, become possessed by the 'fictions / between the words where people go missing, / go dead, go / buried and gone under.'

Late in INFRASTRUCTURES, the poet asks, 'Do you hear / the difference between an explosion in the movies and in your life?' It's no yes-or- no question but the call to attention that this wild, dark book makes. She half-teases, 'My comma is my slit on the material, ' and the book seeks to account for such pauses--in fidelity, in politics, in the stutter she understands to exist in the soundtrack which would seem, she suggests, to make all seem possible. In commerce and in mortality itself. The book delineates awareness of all that that splice stands in for and in awe of, all that versus the desire or feeling of obligation, Hatmaker writes, of some men and women to 'blow through the spaces between the words in order to give a more rounded sound to the language.' Gentle reader, be forewarned: no spaces are blown through here. 'If you're not nervous'--as Miles Davis may have said--'you're not paying attention.'--C.S. Giscombe

Elizabeth Hatmaker's vibrant new book INFRASTRUCTURES is a feverish exploration of the specters conjured by media. Here, reality is production and postproduction, and Media and Life do not so much interact as stage and restage a proliferation of social rites. Perry Mason, childhood insomnia, Bonnie and Clyde, and windy Midwestern streets are spliced together as passionately as the sights/sounds in later Godard films. In INFRASTRUCTURES, we are watching ourselves watch others watch us. A perfect book for our times.--James Pate

In INFRASTRUCTURES, Elizabeth Hatmaker 'noses on toward / someplace that is / not here.' How could her poetry be anything other than brave? Skewered by contradictions, we navigate her alt worlds, sketched through cinema and inhabited through intellect. Yet she cycles through places visible to anyone looking around. Desire in Chicagoland's tri-state zone flows through highways all dub and juxtaposition. Sybaris proliferates up and down the map--because this city famous in Greek mythology for pleasure seeking and luxury has reappeared as a hotel chain dedicated to Midwestern adult romance. Toying with another thing most insistently here, Hatmaker plucks at regulatory language, then drops its noise elegantly by the wayside. She pursues instead a 'living range / between / static and audibility.' What most amazes me about Elizabeth Hatmaker is her tremendous humanity, a constant, urgent transgression animating all her poetry. Love and death are fucked up. Somehow it's a beautiful ride.--Kristin Dykstra