Abstract

This Bygone Route is a strange, vaguely autobiographical, archaeology of the grand and the intimate that presupposes the worlds we occupy— often taken for granted as banal, safe, assumed known— are fundamentally grounded upon substrata of numbing nostalgia and fractured empathy. My work weaves through natural and constructed spaces rendering these zones eerie, uncanny, strange, occupied by figures both human and animal that are unsettled and unsettling; a challenge to insulating narratives of control, routine, and safety. My poems are occasionally landmarked by familiar artifacts of analog technostalgia: telephone booths, answering machines, instant cameras and other such devices. These objects persist on the fringes of our contemporary moment as charming anachronisms but within these poems they are instilled with eerie prominence, ironically reactivated against the dulling energies of nostalgia and materialism. This Bygone Route is an implication, that the personal and collective histories we celebrate and revere are often rooted in the loam of our darker instincts, our most troubling tendencies, that what gives shape to our most precarious Now. This Bygone Route is a fragmentary map to unstable futures that we cannot expect or prepare for. Not exactly.