Slow Violence

Author: Katherine Duckworth

Publisher: Beautiful Days Press (2023)

In 1984, Bubba Helms was photographed in front of a burning police vehicle, becoming a teenage symbol of Detroit’s World Series riots. Katherine Duckworth’s Slow Violence "tills with Bubba" as its ostensible subject, tracing Helms’ tragic life after the riots and refracting it through a “mycelial network of hyperlinks”: a London Plane Tree, a stadium in Oakland, General Motors, a farming simulation, a colony of monk parakeets in Brooklyn, the paper mill company WESTVACO, and “one hundred million unexploded / land mines.”

In its prismatic montage of documentation, life writing, and lyric compression, Slow Violence tills the poetic compulsion to catalog in a time of planetary decline and rising techno-fascism: “the long dyings, the interest / accumulating.” In the words of Nicole Rose, it is “grief, composting.” It is as much about exhaustion (tired and ruined bodies; ruined brains; exhausting phrases and images) as it is about liberation. It is an elegy to something not yet named, with an “ill-equipped beak.”