Bøker av Ruth Ellen Kocher

A surreal poetry collection considering memory and self-discovery through the character of the archon, the keeper of the mental archive. In Ruth Ellen Kocher's Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site and of event. As keeper of the archive, Kocher's archon determines what pieces of the past may be preserved, housed, documented, ordered, and reviewed. Through these poems, the archon dives deep into memories and into the mysteries of daily life, and, in governance over the future, determines what will be and should be forgotten. The act of forgetting becomes archival violence, with the archon not only serving as the guardian of what remains in the archive but also as an eradicator who decides what is purged. The imagistic and surreal language of this collection invites us to explore a non-logical terrain as we follow the protagonist into her darkest memories and find a path for our own journey of self-discovery.

Praising the power of lyric drama, T. S. Eliot described the use of third voice as a means for characters to address and interrogate one another, and second voice as a way for characters to talk to the audience. In this daring new book, the principal narrator presents as a caricature reflecting the tangible experiences of a disembodied "I" posed against absurd selfhood--a voice imbued by sublime otherness. Within a dismantled minstrel show, Ruth Ellen Kocher frames a female voice splintered and re-figured as "self" and "character." The incomprehensible nature of the sublime emerges through a cast of other personages including Eartha Kitt, Geordi LaForge, Immanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X. Third Voice asserts lyric beyond personal expression and drama beyond the stage, using the spectacle of minstrelsy as a deformation of mastery in an audaciously conceptual yet visceral performance.

"If the human experience is the equivalent of the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes that notion a few steps further by centering cosmology in a raced and gendered body, in a union of god and soul that, within our material world, easily vacillates between love and hate, joy and despair. The body manifests as divine presence made mortal, as an infinity singing the generative human arc of being-ness with an electric resonance. In godhouse, the reader encounters the universe made personal and celebratory, as an infinity that endures the complications of flesh and the necessary resistance to our most ungodly and monstrous expressions of personhood"--

Poetry. African American Studies. Winner of the 2001 Green Rose Prize. WHEN THE MOON KNOWS YOU'RE WANDERING turns on the theme of lost and found paths, of being perpetually lost and then found. But even more than lost, driven to abandon the paths of one's past. The moon in the title poem serves as landmark, tool of navigation, and silent witness. The speaker, distracted by the world, wanders, spiritually and physically, searching for some anchor that will return her to a significant sense of "home." She becomes a migrant of sorts, finding her way by what is common to all of us: landscape, song, and memory. Resolution for the speaker comes not in the journey but in the return to the simple articles of a life, the things we call home.