HOTEL ABC

Susan Gevirtz’s new work blends the arts of ornithomancy (bird-watching as a form of divination) and bibliomancy (finding secret patterns in texts). Hotel abc, situated “way up in the sky,” is a flowing structure akin to a flock of birds, where words reform and re-fire ancient meanings, found meanings, and broadcasts from the future. Opening the wings of this book, we join the “ecstatic birds of the no-fly zone,” accessing hidden and forbidden spaces within language, and finally recognizing the poet as the bird-handler of our words.

Gevirtz maps the space of the silently repeated in a dragnet poetics of spiraling, turbulent lyrics. These poems trawl the language of war and upheaval that abides our era of uprising and riot, drone warfare and the neoliberal economic order for those troubled words flagged for present experience, across the strata of the powerful and powerless. Hotel abc places us in a moment—a “Joyopolis,” a “state of undress a state of dress,” even a “Seaworld”—when “the future you asked about is a square torn out / of the center” a moment of linguistic and somatic attrition defined by struggle, defined with struggle: against order, objects, violence. And these poems hinge on that exact conjunctive drift. We are “bereft with desertion,” “broken into by sound.” But we are also taken by “such bewildment.”