Spool

Andrew Brenza’s Spool is a reckoning of our diminished natural world through the register of a disjointed, smeared, and unraveling poetics.  Consisting of a series of breathless lyrical and concrete poems, Spool strives to represent both nature’s beauty as well as the tragedy of its destruction, a destruction which is, ultimately, the destruction of ourselves. But the book does not descend entirely into despair, for the author’s novel approaches to poetic expression suggest an alternative way that humanity might imagine its place in the world, a way that fundamentally incorporates and enacts humanity’s vital connection to nature. It is through this alternative poetics that Brenza offers hope, albeit a difficult one, since it asks us not just to change the way we think about nature, but the way we think about and within language itself.