Noise Event

Poetry. "The state of mind here is Florida, its flora and fauna and beaches and high schools, and Heidi Lynn Staples is hearing it all, from birdsong ('shrill killy killy' to 'harsh kak kak') to boyfriends ('a really wonderful time in 7th period Stay unique! Maybe you won't want to marry me anymore'). A masterful listener and music-maker, Staples'S homophonic translations echo throughout the poems with a noise more joyful than any poet's made of language in recent memory. 'Of the language-powered poets on the poetic landscape, Heidi Lynn Staples is one of the only ones whose heart powers the machine.'"—Mary Karr

"I'm first in line to read anything Heidi Lynn Staples writes, and NOISE EVENT both reaffirms and increases my ardor. Here, the poetic 'I' is overtaken by the Floridic 'I,' and memoir as it is written today is shown to be irreconcilable with the contemporary biography of place. But it is the tension between the two that compels the reader forward; it is the music of the lines themselves—and Staples is among the most musical of poets—as they build upon, and call back to, one another, that makes the radical newness Staples achieves, especially in the section titled 'Barking at Clouds,' welcoming and engrossing."—Shane McCrae

"At least since John Donne described the naked body of his lover as 'O, my America, my Newfoundland, / My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,' America has had a troubled relationship to sex, geography, imperialism and metaphors. Bringing a wide range of formal and stylistic approaches (from google-y dada exercises to Steinian nonsense to letters to Elizabethan conceits), Heidi Lynn Staples writes about or rather in that wound. The most fundamental technique here is the use of an unsutured collage that bares the wound but does not offer us a way out or through. A letter to a boyfriend is brought together with colonial descriptions of the murder of Native Americans, the description of a romantic experience is brought together with factual descriptions of the land (America, Florida) but it is unsutured, the art of a trauma that can't be healed."—Johannes Göransson