Reps

Author: Kendra Sullivan

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2024)

In her first full-length poetry collection, Reps, Kendra Sullivan cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds through the un/disciplined integration of discrete epistemes; and the cultivation of a few anti-catastrophic [writing] strategies to locate and live by the compass in compassion in an age of climate chaos.