the seaweed sd treble clef
Oxeye Press, 2021
This 12 poem sequence written from 12 photographs taken during 2018 is a tactile, incantatory give-and-take between coalescing and unravelling encounters, the washing in and out of natural forms and stark, tangled public realities. The language invoked by these washed up splays of seaweed is taut with physicality and slipping compounds—kelpnodule middledrink, empirelogic, and botanical swarms—investigating what is action and what is utterance.
Reviews
“…Hartigan composes poems of mantic prophecy, reading the shape of the seaweed as omen to be interpreted: “treble clef,” “commatip,” “cuneiformish.” This detritus becomes the ur-book to the world’s deeper grammar which, if we could only learn to read, we might ourselves write a poem worth the making…”
