Humans
- davy knittle (author)
- Emma Steinkraus (artist)
Page count
32Keywords
Poetry, Of Systems Of, Place, Setting, Liminal, Relationships, Domestic, Experiment, ExperimentalPublication date
2015Language(s)
EnglishPublication media type
Print DocumentChapbook
Publication series
Unlimited Editionscyclorama
“Davy Knittle’s poems invite us into a myriad of homes — the house of the body, the street, the car, the subway, the animal. by calling this gem of a collection a ‘cyclorama,’ he invites us into a gorgeous panorama that envelopes us in ‘the life of every sound,’ ‘the lot for cars between cars,’ ‘dream coffee,’ and ‘in the balance/and behind the balance range.’ These poems are paintings. these poems are windows. these poems use language as a process in which motion and relationship are always present (Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry). Davy’s poems build a world I want to live in — honest, lyrical, smart, unafraid to risk and feel, poems that ask all the hard questions all the right ways. He writes: ‘I do the work / to hold a body / different readers know / is theirs to name.’” — erica kaufman
“Time and space aren’t really like that — how you expect them to be, at least, not after you start to accumulate so many things to remember. Davy knows that the time and space we really move through, comes from the heart out, always changing. So sometimes you’re arches and a house, sometimes you’re more in the car than other times. He writes ‘where else is left / there we can / spend one night / in a room / with nothing / but the Bangles.’ It’s this constant shifting or slipping, not forwards or backwards like a regular car, but inside and outside, in and out. These poems make me feel like I’m in the passenger seat of a very strange car Davy is driving, down real streets, then imagined Houston streets, then dream streets to ER coffee, to feet pounding yellow shirt summer streets, and all around there’s so much activity and possibility, and inside the car, which is the heart of the poems, like inside my heart when I read Davy’s amazing poems, there’s so much life & music & room.” — Laura Henriksen
cyclorama occurs in the car. it occurs in the house, and in bed and in the shower and on the street and running down the street, in standard uses of spaces quotidian to a kind of urban life, and aberrant uses of those spaces. it occurs in synesthetic simultaneity. perhaps you are in the room but also in the shower. or in the car and also in the train station waiting area. one place is the green of another place, and is then also that place, even if it stops being green.
many of these are domestic spaces, or spaces rendered domestic by thoughts of intimacy. even so, the speaker of these poems spends a lot of time alone thinking about domestic spaces, or everyone else is asleep, or they’re in the past but being in this house feels like being in that other house by means of how different it also feels, and so that house is in the room. if the compulsive representation of other rooms within this one is a difficult thing, it’s also a kind of luck. — davy knittle
About the Contributor(s)
davy knittle's work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Rain Taxi, Denver Quarterly, and Caketrain. He lives in Iowa City, where he co-curates the Human Body Series with Sophia Dahlin.
Emma Steinkraus is a visual artist living in Iowa City. Her current obsessions include imagined apocalypses, witches and mushrooming; her recurrent obsession is with depictions of romantic love. Before moving to Iowa as an Iowa Arts Fellow in the Painting program, she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at Williams College. She has received a Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship, a Frederick M. Peyser Prize, worked as a Steamboat Scholar in Contemporary Curation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and completed residencies at the Henry Luce III Center for Arts and Religion and at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.
