The Bringers of Fruit

The Bringers of Fruit: An Oratorio is a polyvocalic retelling of the Persephone myth that investigates memory, code, and relationships.Elizabeth Switaj's Bringers of Fruit continues Switaj's long standing engagement with myth, seen in her previous books, A Broken Sanctuary and Magdalene & the Mermaids. With the repeating refrain "I almost got away with it," readers wait expectantly for a confrontation that doesn't come, but instead morphs into alternate narratives. Unlike other poets' engagements with lyrical tropes, Switaj does not use mythology as a form of coerced conventionality that is often seen; she's got code. These myths, updated for the modern world, have MP3s, Ray-bans, html coding, "join my band," as well as scientific language and imagery: we encounter "prions," "origami cells," "nucleotides," "monomers," and "cyanosis." These poems show an examined emotionality fused with the abstract as survival technique - "cerebral snow." - Carrie HunterCorpselords and chthonic gods congregate in Elizabeth Switaj's underworldly "grumble of lights." Myth and form alike shiver, shrivel, and arrive in the space "where moon/ snails suck the marrow from bones/ they've pierced." These necrocantos sing the fugue songs of the dead that won't die. May we all have a psychopomp as deft of ear and image as Switaj to lead us through this encoded hell. - Candice Wuehle