Mathilda Cullen

Stanzas for Four Hands Mathilda Cullen

"Stanzas for Four Hands: An Ophanim is not poetry as a means to explanation but rather an investigation of political and spatial thought. This book uses the page as a visual and sympathetic field to contend with a radical dialogical and the complex histories and contemporaries of the lyric that dispenses the content of the poetry into what truly feels like a brand-new poetics. I haven't read a contemporary book of poetry in a long time with as dynamic a lyric, as radical a use of language as a site for political engagement. The experience of reading it will render retention and create new fractured meanings out of sound, semantics, syntax, and form. As the poetry reads, "I will Deny: / that a poem can do anything at all. I will Deny: / that labor can love itself. I will choose to leave the stanza / I was written into.""

-- Julianne Neely




"Mathilda Cullen and Dominick Knowles ask questions that can only be answered with revolt. "What poetics evades the police without policing evasion?" we read in something like a statement of artistic intent: "is there a violence that can let the poem kiss its riot without acting its riot shield?" Reminding us that stanzas are the living rooms of empire, that lines are the lounge chairs of mass death, and that that no recognized rhythm or meter will ever grip the falling rate of profit, these poems refuse to offer any sort of transcendental vantage point. They also reject the stale idealism of institutionalized non-thought, wherein imagination is so frequently misidentified as the principal site of political resistance. Instead, these are poems for those of us who must work to live and who cannot make rent, taking shape as a lyric survey of cracks in the edifice of capital and of possible grounds for communal flourishing. Their resolutely collective pronouns oppose the depredations of the value-form with a world in which everyone, everywhere, has their share of everything. Carry these poems into the streets. Wrap them around a brick and hurl it through a window. Douse them in petrol and torch the nearest precinct."

-- Mark Steven