Solar Trauma

Poetry. "Everybody / should be throwing up all of the time," insists Philip Sorenson's incendiary and tender second collection SOLAR TRAUMA, a book that defies category in deference to the "uncontainableness of things." Sorensen writes to expose classification's errors and terminate endings: "to reject the premise that space is ever empty or divisible," to "reject purity and elsewhereness." Like the wails made by a hand trembling over the theremin, SOLAR TRAUMA's musical forms and anxieties slide and swerve.




Unflinchingly fretful and frequently hilarious, these poems enumerate the radial, radical horrors the body can endure and inflict: "and when I cease // . . . // I become the body / from which I believe I already act // and split and split again / a dehiscence a thing a skin // essentially a constellation of threats." This body of concern has no limit: think The Thing meets critical theory meets parenting meets polar devastation meets the internet; think of how to let anything go: "how can we get rid of this thing can we just throw it away what happens to it when // we do."