Dick: A Vertical Elegy

Poetry. "Sam Truitt's unusually sculptural poem is a lockbox of secrets. But each layer of concealment, spun out of language, reveals more insidious truths. The use of Morse code and Shakespearian fragments provides a cool and elusive, but also disturbing, conceptual frame. As in Hannah Weiner's Semaphore and Tom McCarthy's C, the act of coding both enacts and compresses distance. Feminine speech and military speech, ciphers for American life in the mid-20th century, rattle around the edge of a grave or a bomb site. DICK pulsates with violence and mystery."—Chris Kraus