Surveille

"It was breeding season, / wasn't it, and they were running from something," writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille's queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into-and ultimately protect from-this hostile world. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Roach's poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. She writes, "Still, I watch / the watcher watch me watch / the man standing in front of me / peering through the crosshatch / iron mesh, waiting for bodies / beloved he knows he cannot touch / to arrive on the other side." Surveille is a book about people under various forms of control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), about mothering, and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair. Hold the husk. Suck each bead out. There are degrees of loss, speeds at which pain travels through the body. See, even the rose neck's bent. I do not need to tell you I'm sick. I want to be remembered for the absence my body made in space. -Excerpt from "Gardening, the mother gives her daughter a lesson on loss"