An innovative suite of poems for the drone age

 

The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution.

 

Excerpt from "Opened"

 

This is the box, frozen against hierarchy

at a value of some $10m, simply a form of being;

 

surgeon's box, patient's wound,

an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium.

 

The gaze is on the side of things.

 

 

The angel of evil could not have done that.

 

A child is in heaven. The box is empty,

 

saying nothing but "construction." It really is

like swatting flies; we can do it forever

easily and you feel nothing.