Atopia

Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Your mist today is incredible as it settles on this rose garden! When the largest rose shook off its dew and looked at me like a cartoon, I smiled back and promised not to break his neck. And here we are together again, walking in a park that honors dead children. A tree planted for each child on such a mild day in December. And how the dead children stream through me, scrolls of them: Lily! Rose! Bobby! Kierkegaard says anyone who follows through on an idea becomes unpopular. And also that a person needs a system, otherwise you become mere personality. He must not have known very many poets, so prone to tyrannical shifts in mood. Change in the weather is equal to don't let me go crazy. In the car on the way to school Charlotte says, "I like to be gentle with nature because I like nature." But my mind wouldn't rest, system-less, as I drive through dread: Lily! Rose! Bobby! You're dead, you're dead. Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as "robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque" and "a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life." These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes.