Secret Histories

Author: Craig Watson

Publisher: Burning Deck (2007)

Secret Histories is interested in the way history is constructed as an active engagement with a non-negotiable future, as opposed to the passive receipt of past "truths." "Steppe Work" presents itself as recovered fragments from the height of the Mongol Empire, the largest land-based empire in history. "Last Man Standing" is offered in the classical form of a shepherd's calendar, counting down the last 12 months of the last man alive on earth. Between and through these sequences, the poem "Pre/Science" attempts to inhabit a present moment that is continually slipping into the layered time-keeping of human consciousness. In fragments and disjointed observations, the book tries to replicate and in fact become the process of "making" history itself.

Secret Histories completes a trilogy that includes Free Will and True News.