Brandan Griffin Impastoral

"The typingspawning in IMPASTORAL is not in The Human, not in a human, but it flies through the possible voices of other outside-insides-slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language isn't human or not human, it undoes that very idea, so these beings-slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode mammaltexts-aren't on the outside anymore. Letterwords are cells or flummoxing quanta, particulate and mutating, waving about. If you follow science all the way around it passes through a pagebrane. Boundaries get slimed. A synthetic, nonce, and hyperpossible poetry. Your experiences are deformed into the experiences of other beings. We can hatch into a world we're not eating up. We are going to hear many faroffsvery near"--
Poems that blur the boundaries of language and species, inviting us to imagine a new world. The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides—slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin’s poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings—slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts—morph and change in between boundaries. Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems’ composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world. Impastoral won the Omnidawn Open Book contest, selected by Brian Teare.