Styrofoam - by Evelyn Reilly (Paperback)

About the Book

Poetry. "A vast Sargasso sea of plastic fragments the size of a continent has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. How do we go about living in what Evelyn Reilly defines as 'our infinite plasticity prosperity plentitude' and still have room for poetry? STYROFOAM might just show us how to do this. It's a wonderful, mad, challenging itinerary"--John Ashbery. Her previous books include HIATUS, which was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the chapbook Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces.

Book Synopsis

Styrofoam: In this tour de force of applied poetics, Reilly casts a "clear dome over the fake snowstorm" of human spirit, and sings the body plastic. If polymers have a destiny, as the ultimate Ideal Material, Reilly is their phenomenologist, synthesizing domains out of "the multiplicity of foam and foam¹ s conditions," spirit¹ s antithesis to the human comedy, and animal tragedy, of extinction. Can we avoid such an Inferno, say "goodnight styrene," without examining the broken dust of our lingo, the abhorrent force of plasticity? Can poetry be more than Paradise with a plastic garden at the end of it? Let Reilly be our guide through this Purgatory of partial objects, let lux arise from a sea of foam. A solvent book for unabsolvable times. - Jonathan Skinner

About the Author

, published by Roof Books. Having Broken, Are was recently published by BlazeVOX. Styrofoam is widely read and written about as an example of ecopoetics and avant-garde experimentation. Reilly has been a writer and exhibit developer for numerous museums, including the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Museum of Jewish History and Tolerance Center (Moscow), the United States Peace Institute (Washington, D.C.), and the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington). Her most recent museum work was for the Obama Presidential Center. Reilly is also a member of the Steering Committee of the climate activist group 350NYC. Reilly lives in New York City and the Hudson River Valley.