![(Find Yourself) at Constant Falls by Kathrine Sowerby [ISBN: 9781915108043]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/319ea2_56b6e14f3f9a4af4b1fb40d85a2f9aba~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_3024,h_4032,al_c,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/319ea2_56b6e14f3f9a4af4b1fb40d85a2f9aba~mv2.jpg)
ISBN: 978-1-915108-04-3
Date of Publication: 29 September 2022
A sequence of 108 prose poems. There's a dark humour at work as the author explores the trials of finding oneself in an age of lockdown and pandemic, information overload, regulation and shopping. Sowerby confronts an irrational world with emotional intensity & dark humour—think John Ashbery & Lyn Hejinian both drifting into something else.
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Find yourself a statement brain. An illustrated study labelled ‘when important’ the way words harden on gravestones with moss and renewed looking. Looking or looming. Looming around after dark between the stones at the back of the village, would that be the right response. It would be what felt right. Little photographs. Lichen. Nothing but talking and a deer symbolises daily love, someone once said. Or read. Or drew. They were scared and the deer helped. Zoom in on its face, its golden eyes, the fence post, back to the eyes. The old lady offering crumbs. Not quite in focus but near enough. Careful not to step on the frog. It’s all go on this path. Straight and woven. The deer could be stuffed, hasn’t moved for whole minutes. You label it ‘reliable’.
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"Post-pandemic, as life gets back to some kind of ‘normal,’ we find ourselves confused about ‘vaccines and time.’ Sowerby’s prose poems – each of which begins ‘Find yourself…’ – read like oblique reworkings of the opening tercet of Dante’s Inferno. This surreal arrangement is the perfect summation of our collective disorientation about where exactly we are nowadays. It’s like finding yourself stuck in a loop with Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via (48 Dante Translations),’ Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Renee Gladman’s Calamities and Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’. In fact, this sick sequence is the poetic equivalent of coming to in middle age/post-covid and thinking ‘My God! What have I done?’ Or, rather, what has Sowerby done?" —nicky melville
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