Éireann Lorsung
 

a relatively soft radioactive metal with a silvery appearance
first intentionally synthesized, isolated, and identified in 1944
the discovery was closely related to the Manhattan Project
The nation contains intrinsic defects.
Something has been sending out messages at the rate of decay.
This varies. Because nò bòdy does nòt respond to radiation.
It is concentrated on those who witnessed the explosions, and in the soil.

Part Two: a white substance heaving westward.
O! Pioneers! In truth the word landscape is the mark of an outside gaze.
If present on earth, you will have decayed by now.
The other side of multitudes is continental death.


The past is in the flesh.
As the isotope “lives” in the landscape of atomic testing.
In the laboratory; in the desert.

Which is to say in the nation.
Corroding at the rate of century.
A continual dragnet: skin, too, has a half-life.


O Lord in the morning you hear my voice.
Where white could be salt or sky.

White, as in the evacuated city on the filmstrip.
The B-29 making its pass as the clouds open, called miracle.


To ensure the safety of the aircraft.

Nevada or that other place beginning with N.
from the book THE CENTURY / Milkweed Editions
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"The Unhappy Life of Vivien Eliot"

"She supported Eliot’s talent, enthusing over The Waste Land even when it seemed to communicate the nervy conflict of their disastrous marriage....Combining the roles of muse and Fury, she was, too, an author, publishing in her husband’s magazine the Criterion in the mid-1920s."

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Jennifer Grotz on "Pantarheia"  

"What is it we’re actually influenced by when we read or translate from other languages? One answer lies in what the late critic Daniel Albright called panaesthetics, a sort of belief that certain universal principles might unite artists or the process of making, regardless of medium or language. But another answer might be that we go to the work of other languages or other art forms in order to escape an influence or given tendency that our own language and tradition may exert on our making."
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