Word / World by Marianne Morris
WORD/WORLD is a book of three registers. The collections Alphabet Poems, Apples and Origins, and then the Word/World poems themselves, comprise the contents of this book. These three constitute a progression, through language, from the unruly, abstracted language of trauma, into a more integrated and embodied approach to a language that inhabits an awakened body in the present tense.
The fabric of WORD/WORLD spans heirloom seeds, police murders, witch burning, Ayahuasca tourism, shamanism, the asteroid Chiron, soul mates, alchemical principles, plant medicine, tantric sex, gangster rap and the end of American Apparel. It is an attempt to heal divisions and static states, and looks towards a world that exists outside of duality.
Building on the work of Morris first book, The On All Said Things Moratorium, WORD/WORLD firmly establishes poetry as its own language, a language which borrows from but is not like other language, and in which ideas can be held, examined, questioned from different angles, and exploded.