Terminal Diagrams Poems [Hardcover]

Garrick DavissTerminal Diagramsmay have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Regardless, their vision is so bleak and unsparing, only a few will be able to savor them. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized. Whether his subject is a car accident on the freeways of Los Angeles or the Book of Revelation transmitted by television, Daviss stanzas conjure a kind of futuristicnoir. In poem after?poem, he examines the artistic possibilities of the machine, and its alterations of human experience, with a modern spirit thatas Baudelaire defined ithas embraced the sublimity and monstrousness of something new.

Garrick Davis’sTerminal Diagramsmay have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized. In poem after
poem, he examines the artistic possibilities of the machine, and its alterations of human experience, with a modern spirit that—as Baudelaire defined it—has embraced “the sublimity and monstrousness of something new.”

These are formally elegant poems on subjects that are inelegant and indeed chaotic and mad. That juxtaposition gives [these] poems an enormous leverage and credence and conviction.
 Sherod Santos, author ofThe Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems