Author Description

""Object permanence" refers to the early developmental stage in which the child learns that the world exists independently of one's own ability to perceive it. The lyric poems in Michelle Gil-Montero's first full-length collection cling to the elusive debris of daily life in order to evoke, paradoxically, its impermanence. As the "spare valuables" of one daily life, these poems summon an emotionally resonant world both intimate and foreign. It is the liminal world of early motherhood, of early morning, of seasons in transition, of the terrain vague of post-industrial landscapes-a space where what isn't encroaches on what is. These lyrics pressure the expressive possibilities of language, so that sound hovers on the verge of becoming object, and object threatens to evaporate into sound"--