WE ARE IT for MARTHE REED

And here we go with my first 2020 poetry collection, an e-chap that I wish did not exist: WE ARE IT. I wish it did not exist as I would rather have Marthe Reed back in this life ... even as she lives forever in poetry. WE ARE IT is part of a moving collective homage put together by one of today's smartest and most effective poetry presses, Dusie. Mine takes off (as many of the others do) from one of Marthe's wise statements. For WE ARE IT:

In her essay “somewhere inbetween: Speaking-Through Contiguity”, Marthe Reed (1959-2018) directs us to Timothy Morton’s reframing of human/other-than- human relationships as “drastically collective”—“All kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention.” 

“Escape from this truth lies through no doorway, no slippery construct of language or argument: ‘we’ are ‘it,’ inextricable from our circumstances. The point on which all else turns: within this ‘drastically collective’ condition, how, then...live? Indeed, how write?” —Marthe Reed, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene

We miss you, Marthe...