On Certainty

Author: Karla Kelsey

Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing (2023)

In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.

Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.

"On Certainty is a feminist, philosophical meditation on love, loss, and ways of knowing—through history, through philosophy, technology, and through the body. Like the taxidermied deer sculpture covered with crystal spheres that the book makes reference to, On Certainty considers the blurring of the real and the virtual, the conceptual and the embodied. There are no simplistic borders, no clear edges. There is instead beauty and lyricism in language, the accumulative power of repetition and re-contextualizing of phrases and imagery, and there are provocations, thrilling in all their ontological possibilities."

—Mary-Kim Arnold