The Monarchs (Meander Scar)

Poetry. THE MONARCHS is a conversation. Pastoral field notes picnic with the voiceovers and subtitles of films and other forms to transform "the wet paper of the sky" into a techno-naturescape. Visual and aural, these textual sculptures transport readers from monarch groves to Mars. Any earthling's ear reenters the world anew after this read. Noel pollinates primary sources to produce a hybrid: medicinal, personal and pleasurable, these poems are lyric documentaries of an imagined reality. Welcome. Here, kings are unseated, and there is no apocalypse. "Loose little fists of apples and the moon" and "a perfume of opera" remain."Melanie Noel has managed a remix of natural history in which an acute attention to the details of the world brings us up close, but at a marvelously odd angle. Things we know well remain familiar, yet take on new twists and, above all, new relationships—cashmere dawn and aviary eyelet—her stunning phraseology and vibrant vision put things together in novel, awakening ways. Tender and bitingly exact, this work is among the most exciting of our time."—Cole Swensen