Machinacje

In Maria Cyranowicz’s most recent collection machinations, the poet’s long-standing critique of the avant-garde and her commitment to formalist experimentation gain new momentum. Conceptually injecting cool surfaces of found language with a strikingly intimate, emotional register, machinations expands the poetic protocols of her previous acclaimed book den.presja (deepression) (2009). Her poetry performs a vital inquiry into the machinations underlying discourse and poetic language itself, teasing the porous boundaries of the mechanical vs. non-mechanical as well as the expressive vs. non-expressive.

Cyranowicz’s new poetry returns to her earlier intention to investigate the compulsive perseveration, rather than perseverance, of the avant-garde; its impulse long lost, its afterimage strangely resurfacing. It is also, much more ominously, a reminder that poetry is fully implicated in actively reproducing the ongoing machinations of the current cultural politics, amputating any possibility of unmediated experience or privacy in the public sphere. At the same time, her writing is also a corrosive that feeds on these machinations, tracing the cracks in their traumatic lining by turning each layer inside out, constantly shifting their apparently dead structures, inspecting what the different facets reveal, and pointing to those that are still alive and worth salvaging.