Echolocation

Author: Evelyn Reilly

Publisher: Roof Books (2018)

In her provocatively innovative and innovatively provocative collection, Echolocation, Evelyn Reilly sounds out a techno-saturated world that perhaps we already occupy. She refuses easy answers or evaluations: animals are processed into food in brutal ways and the boundaries of person- and species-hood are expanded and exploded, while new forms of life and collectivity emerge. Bodies, of organism and of text, are ever-shifting, accumulating new modes of signification and habitation. The text becomes a habitat. Ever resourceful, Reilly interrogates “the natural” without discarding it. Instead, she ushers in an Anthropocene poetics that refuses hierarchical differentiation between the ecological and the technological; neither is demon or savior.

Seamlessly weaving together feminist posthuman theory with zoological report with Melville texts, Echolocation is a cyborg organism, made of parts created and found, and exudes a dynamism that cannot be reduced to collage alone. “The biodegradability of these thought patterns” she writes, “Animality in the best sense of the word / Everyone keeps moving.” The poetry indeed keeps on moving as machinery and ecosystem in which the word and the world overflow with a capacious posthumanism – “A thesis / on the river.”

In this hybrid text, a porosity of concepts, bodies, and texts generates new forms, meanings, and socialities, and the same porosity that renders entities vulnerable to domination and separation also offers visions of escape. This book does not ask how can we live together. Instead, Echolocation begins from a stance that questions whether we were ever separate to begin with, and from there orients toward an ethics of conviviality. How do we live in this condition of togetherness, of a borderless self? In Echolocation the reader is given the gift of finding a place “among other fugitive / super-permeable / spokescreatures.”