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The Alcestis Machine

Poems

Carolyn Oliver author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Acre Books

Published:13th Nov '24

£14.00

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The Alcestis Machine cover

Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.

In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”

Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”

"Celestial and lush, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, The Alcestis Machine, vibrates with connection. The anaphoric incantation 'In another life' opens many of the collection’s poems, taking the reader through a lyric, imaginative wilderness of possibility. I, or we, become—through Oliver’s inventive and formally ambitious lens—cosmologists, orchards, and interpreters, traveling through galaxies, relationships, and climates with our 'suitcase[s] full of stars.' And when we zoom in close to life’s intimacies, like 'the pleasure / of warm water coursing over my hands

ISBN: 9781946724809

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 10mm

Weight: 113g

88 pages