A Complicated Piece of Machinery With Numerous Possibilities for Injury

A COMPLICATED PIECE OF MACHINERY WITH NUMEROUS POSSIBILITIES FOR INJURY
Poems by Maggie Cleveland

ISBN: 978-1-941462-29-4

“William Carlos Williams once defined a poem as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words,’ and poet Maggie Cleveland’s A Complicated Piece of Machinery with Numerous Possibilities for Injury memorably fleshes out that possibility by revealing that the heart itself is fabricated with switches and terminals, erotic charge and electrical voltage, plumb wires and infinite resistance. Separated into five sections—or floors—this book rises from an intimate look at the mechanics of elevators up through a series of compelling erasures of a public document on manufacturing accidents and finally onto the rooftop of a long poem that channels Charles Olson or Rachel Blau DuPlessis but that remains utterly distinctive in its evocation of an external and internal landscape perpetually decaying in time, where memory is a ‘rough rope net’ and our waters are ‘almost safe for swimming.’ Simultaneously canny with warning, structurally ambitious and deeply personal yet universal, Cleveland captures the scale, the tumult, the thrill and the quiet of contemporary life in a remarkable first book of poems.”

Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize-winning author of 17 books