After projects the resound

“The exhausted object have no body of work,” says one poem in Kimberly Alidio’s After projects the resound. But that’s just surface. Ever lurking and in ALL CAPS even are potential poems that would affirm, “LOL AGENCY AND THE COURAGE TO SPEAK.” From the “howling on YouTube” to “Igorots at St. Louis” to the “new sardonic” to “a heart hit twice by shrapnel,” the poems skitter over, infiltrate, radiate, revolt from, and apply “karaoke studies” to interrogate both history and contemporary culture, especially cracks and what lurks within them. These poems are attuned to as many zeitgeists as reveal themselves. From Alidio’s dissecting eyes and focused hands—the “I [who] can sense the space around objects in the room because I’m often unnoticed”—the Filipino trait of Kapwa (interconnectedness) enables poems to arise and they bespeak: “This is exactly what gentleness is // dragging everything up whole—” —Eileen R. Tabios via Black Radish Books