Saccade Patterns

Author: Deborah Meadows

Publisher: BlazeVOX books (2011)

Saccade Patterns explores vision, the erotic gaze, and social discernment. The book opens with a shuffled text that dismantles melodrama by inscribing primate capacity for abstract thought. There's even a list of possible names for a pet cricket that follows a mathematic iteration. The poems seem to ask how an ekphrastic poem based on the story of Tristan und Isolde illumines the oldest gaze of love and eros. "Highways out to desert proving grounds" lead to technologically-enhanced vision, failures in our "dynastic speed-up."

"Some crazy inter-speciation all relative going on here. Keep up the reflexes. But without rules, no axiomatic set—or: something takes over the rules. Words thinking, re-rule, feel. Need de-bunking? Gladiatorial spoof, dirty rimshots—'how squeeze structures.' 'Will/we fall out/of our shadows?' The subject self-perfumes, not too allegorized. Engines lighten touch on proximate jitters strapped to the galaxy. Your bestiary or mine. Pleasure gives outlandish learning: resist containment. We’re leaning in toward its surface, likely haptic, 'shot sub-surface' multiplication just gets us going. 'how/underneath'—let’s facilitate: 'try to dance.'”  

–Bruce Andrews

"Some things which come to mind are, and of course not all in a derivative way but rather in the way of communion (the way a string from one's sweater will end up in a wren's nest), are Leslie Scalapino's Way and Christopher Smart's cataloging poems. What is so very strong in Meadows' work is its precision in thought and its power of accrual. I see these texts as sincere evidence of a parsing intelligence; taking cross-sections of the world at varying widths and preparing them (by whatever means required) for exploration. This is infinitesimal vision; vision which casts the bonds of the world in bright relief."

–Lance Phillips

"This book by Deborah Meadows is surprising in its audacity. Few texts can assemble and recompose themselves like these, through a process: the gaze (Cubist) takes in the fragment, the splinter, and then their whole. Thus each detail is foreseen, chosen in advance for an aesthetic solution, like a puzzle setting in the substance of its lines: porous, material, bright, liquid. You feel the vision, her way of seeing, and you learn to see that which is different through her angle of subjectivity. A window opening to a landscape of the mind, of time. An original space gained, trimmed out in shapes of paper, light. A strange geography that motivates me to revisit its point of view, located not in the subject but in the thing it refracts toward the other—a viewer proposing that this refracted thing may be an instant won out of loss, out of the ordinary. Meadows paints and sculpts with words, provoking the eye to turn toward memories, and toward impossibility."

–Reina María Rodríguez