Sentience - by Meredith Stricker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poetry that invites us to transform our sense of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

With this collection, poet and artist Meredith Stricker considers questions about personhood, belonging, property, and ownership within interdependent living cultural systems. Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens. The poems track bee swarms and hazardous waste, separation walls, and diatoms. They are intently visual, aural, and spatial, tracing the dendritic forms of trees and fractal coastlines and the symmetries of biomorphic animal patterns. They highlight non-artificial, non-extractive intelligences in sharp contrast to the rise of AI. Informed by biosemiotics, SENTIENCE arises from Stricker's continuing multidisciplinary work and architectural habitat restoration in Big Sur and her performance collaborations with musicians, composers, artists, and beekeepers.

Review Quotes

"Stricker's SENTIENCE is a radical expression of loving solidarity with Being, nature's unbounded ground. Fulfilling the literal premise of ecopoetry, oikos and poiesis, these poems fashion a home 'at the non-carceral edge of dreams' where man-made boundaries dissolve: 'your interior my interior the wilderness' interior inside a word.' Hers is a politics of an ensouled world where 'language is/both inside/and outside the body/intra-species, polyphonic.' This is visionary work, its ecstasy derived from the gnosis of delving ever more deeply into ecological relation, its grief an outcome of bearing witness to relation's devastation."

--Brian Teare, author of "Poem Bitten by a Man"

"Stricker's SENTIENCE is a poetic embodiment that intersects creatives from across literary and philosophical disciplines, while inviting readers to imagine how the imagination might encompass more than we ever conceived. Her language is being itself, while simultaneously being a language we all think, feel and experience. It is a wonder how she can navigate through invisible universes that makes one feel nostalgic. Her eloquent 'magic-ifs' leads us to ask if anyone has ever envisioned how the political is as much spiritual as it is not? This collection clearly demonstrates hers is a singular voice echoing the many 'we's' each of us contains."

--George Emilio Sanchez, writer and artist

"Stricker's brilliant SENTIENCE gives us the architectures of the page as a Muschampian museum in our mind, a paradise for saying and seeing. The language and the form are as keenly wound as the honeycomb housing bees. Saying, here, also proclaims loss. Seeing comes in Deleuze/Guattari-like frames, sometimes indexical, sometimes asymmetrical, all rhizomic. Word and image become entanglements where science, dream, and destruction must be witnessed, downloaded, then actionized. With masterful poetic pacing, Stricker's collection accelerates on a neogothic-modern event plane from one page to another and one mind-space to another with an auditory generational resonance. Stricker flames our discontent by summoning Beuys as a fiction-maker and Shelley as the imagist inventor of the inferno of human nature. On whole, SENTIENCE is a love song for survivors, an argument for the soul. For Stricker, beauty dwells in words as if isomers could say, see, and name. SENTIENCE burns with a call for a collective performance, an exchange of awe in praise of lyrical resistance."

--Cydney Payton, curator-at-large, former director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

"The poems in Stricker's 'Hazardous Materials' series rest on a bedrock of notation. The borrowed lines from varied sources: Kafka, Coleridge, Dickinson, Benjamin, Bill Viola, to list only a few are sometimes used as epigraphs, sometimes as scaffolding, and frequently as echoes that argue that all utterance is interconnected. While the poems traffic in lyric beauty, it's never at the cost of pretending the real world with its real ruin doesn't exist: oil spills and waste water infused with prescription drug residues, 'that rawness, the mess/ the Veiling of beauty//lost in twigs, 'cured' of language, unfinished and starry.' I have great confidence in these poems, in their inclusivity and their formal reach. Language is never more than a fractured mirror of world but these poems come closer than most to capturing the complexity of what is in front of us."

--Mary Jo Bang, from the judge's citation for the Iowa Review Poetry prize, on work included in "SENTIENCE"

About the Author

Meredith Stricker is the author of six poetry collections, including REWILD, winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize; Our Animal, winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Award; Tenderness Shore, winner of the National Poetry Series Award; and anemochore, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize and finalist for the Poetry Society of America Four Quartets Award. Her work involves performance, paint, drawing, graphic overlays and hybrid forms of documentary/lyric exploring a sentient world through media ranging from artist books to buildings. As an artist, designer and poet, she co-directs poetics + space, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur, along with projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms.