Black Box Cutaway

Poetry. Susan Gevirtz cuts the box away from the camera as she disassembles other structures that keep the world, as we picture it, in place. For Gevirtz, the cultural is personal, and the personal is constructed as the cultural media--films, TV, newstories, book narratives--are shaped. These poems, gathered from pieces of her deconstructions, are held together by puns, homonyms, metaphors, and blank space. The empty expanses convey a sense of the peril of the self released into the unknown. "If BLACK BOX CUTAWAY is 'risky,'" Gary Sullivan writes in Rain Taxi, it is because it "so thoroughly and convincingly makes us cognizant of the filters through which we perceive--not just language, but life itself."