Science Fiction: A Poem!

Science Fiction: A Poem! is a book-length poem. The unreliable narrator lashes out against aliens, America, and what Martin Ott called "closer enemies of the mind and heart," a list that doubles as the poem's catalogue of grief. It is not science fiction in the genre sense. The register shifts constantly across its lines: lament, accusation, joke, prayer, tirade. Ott read it as "a love poem disguised as a hate poem," and that reading is the right one to start from. The variation is the method, not a side effect of it. The engine is rhythm rather than narrative, and what recurs is voice.