Michael Cooper

Speaking Through Sediment Michael Cooper

Poetry. This dynamic collaboration between Michael Cooper and Cindy Rinne hurtles through the male/female binary into the polyphonic, as the voices prism and ricochet past one another, multiplying in possibility. The trickster spider-god, Anansi, is spirit guide for this collection, at once postmodern and preverbal, as if the world rituals have been rent into fragments that ache toward the formation of a new web-text and textile, one which gathers all the lost, all rejected, orphaned and damaged, the repulsive and the lovely, to "reweave the world" to have "stacked the bodies looking for wholes where their souls peeked out." This is a poetry that invades all planes, from bureaucracy to myth, interrogating poetry's limits, even as it bears witness, unflinchingly, to what we have become.