
Wave Function
Author: Coco M. Keehl
Publisher: Ursus Americanus Press (2021)
That our bodies (and everything they touch) are malleable collections of particles, that time and our perception of it are fictions, that location is only fixed by semiotics are ever-compounding propositions of sciences both hard and soft. In Coco M. Keehl’s Wave Function, these very propositions are broken open across the page, subjectivity is magnified to its molecule, spacetime is breached by the poem’s ability to trespass modes of containment. When the speaker asks “How do you know what altered state you’re in?” they are also giving permission to enter the poems themselves. The reader is invoked, like an incantation, to the spectral, discorporate field of Keehl’s language where every object, sense, and action are codified and decodified, where meaning is both metastatic and implosive, where every word hinges on the inevitability of its own collapse. Wave Function, like the universe, is a terminal text, expanding and exhaling unto its own finality.