Overview
Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between unlikely termsâ€â€highlighting the very notion of exchange between the linguistic and the physical realm. Maxwell’s poems are both generous and demanding. While the operating intelligence behind the poems incessantly questions how one makes a life in language (and vice versa), the poems themselves enact arrangements that might make such pathways possible. These restless and inventive poems provide feats of language that lead us to agree with Maxwell’s speaker when she says: Our awe is our confession.Author Biography
KRISTI MAXWELL is the author of Realm Sixty-Four (2008), Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009) and Re- (2011). Her honors include the Greta Wrolstad Scholarship for Young Poets through the Summer Literary Seminars, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, and the Margaret Sterling Memorial Award.