Shearsman Books

Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611184

Download a PDF sampler from this book.

I-Formation in its entirety is comprised of four separate groups of poems, that when ordered in a particular way, tell a Genesis story. The first book begins in a garden and ends with an incarnation of Eve meeting her coeval. The break between books expresses a break in the story.  Something has happened.  Something perhaps as simple as eating an apple. The second book (2012) addresses the things we are left with once we are thrown out of the garden: co-identity and depiction, the self and landscape. The first section of the second book is a collection of poems based on anagrams of people’s names, and forms a relationship map of this poet’s life. The final section is comprised of poems based largely on the Hudson Valley landscape, a world exterior to and surrounding the garden.

"In this book, Anne Gorrick writes poems of heft and delicacy. Each is constructed as a musical thinking through of an idea, as she builds a poem through deft and fluid repetition and musical ways of speaking. Even though these poems exist here only on the page, her voice, unique and personal, is present in each, and it guides us through her surreal landscapes of concrete abstraction with gentle tenacity and a rich and vivid vocabulary. Everything exists, in her poems, as a thought, as a vision, as a sound through space, and all at once. What a poem must do to justify its existence is to surprise us with its necessary inevitability, which is what these poems do piece by piece, one by one, and together." —Geof Huth

"What is this 'piece of sea kohl on the tongue?' Indescribable, uncapturable, the two primary texts of I-Formation 'abundant inside the unknown weeks' convolute, permutate and gestate into various complex gardens 'informed by duplicate vibrations.' An 'arrangement released from families, beds, factories, from books.' If you, like author Anne Gorrick, "consider stars, their vapor whistles/how they spread out their thoughts across the night" and attend that 'rose whose belief is secure' and 'time dissembled from indigo/the sky broken from its facts' then you just might be ready to enter into the text's dreamy fabulist's 'declaration in color.' But, don't expect to keep your I's intact!" —Kimberly Lyons

Finished with expulsion? Garden again. Here. In an Eden made of metal or terrible gristle or the exact equivalent. Like Adam. Like Eve. You know them? Think again. Indent. Reconfigure. Indent. Reverse. Invent I more as vowel than self—an auto's horn(y) chrome. Anne Gorrick's I-Formation (I) plants readers in a genesis. We watch how she tends to "the excess of humanity"—its clay, its cancer, its color, its counting—with a wry reverence. The visual is intellectual: "To be red in corn, in the need to divide . . ." Sonic recursions become mechanical matter(s): oil drums, rope, yellow narcissus. Making marriage mythic, Gorrick lets desire flourish and combust. One could return to these meditations season after season. I will. "She is systematically new." —Lori Anderson Moseman

Read an interview with Anne Gorrick at Galatea Resurrects here, and another at Open Letters Monthly here. Read reviews at Galatea Resurrects by Lynn Behrendt here and by Allen Bramhall here.

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