Abstract

Apō ptosis is a book of poetry that questions the fragmentation and alienation between the different levels of the human self: the micromolecular and the macromolecular, the biological and the metaphysical, the mythological and scientific. Resisting nihilistic principles of rationalizing humanness, the poems explore human embodiment by re-connecting the self with its micro- and macromolecular surroundings by blending and juxtaposing all levels of human existence, invisible and visible, and setting up a conversation between them. The work is divided in two sections. In the first section, a long-form poem, a female speaker considers what constitutes her ‘self’. Engaging with the story of Helen of Troy, she encounters the phenomena of the undiscovered, the submerged, and the dissimulated that form the self beyond what is physically embodied in the moment; a self just slightly out of time and space, and possibility. The second section is a set of lyrical poems in which the speaker remembers, encounters, and grieves over lost, discovered and never possible parts of her ‘self’ that emerge through encounters with memory, others, and the environment – the macro- and the micromolecular. Grounded in Heidegger's notion of defamiliarizing the familiar and drawing attention to the invisible, the poems create a cohesion between the disparate levels of self in a space where an unfragmented self may exist unrecognized, an in-between space of convergence.