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Deborah Meadows’ latest book of poetry, Bumblebees, is an expansive and radical text written in the language of climate, war, interrogation, and existence. Meadows’ poetics live on the earth of all of disciplines—infusing her language with vital contemporary concerns. Bumblebees will leave the language of global catastrophe stuck in your teeth.
In Bumblebees, Meadows shows us our world with constantly shifting scales, like a camera with its zoom function broken, giving us the details and then zooming out to a greater political, societal, and linguistic context, then zooming right back in to us again. This deft movement adds to the book’s political charge, dealing with issues of environment and humanity in a way few other contemporary poets could. Meadows creates a commune between the single reader and multiple audience, which will remind you of our collective experience, our collective existence.
Meadows’ groundbreaking use of language is layered, non-linear, and wholly unique. It reads as if her language is caught in a tornado—ruptured and flowing/glowing around us. Pulling from many schools of thought, it warps and morphs its surroundings. Grounded with global concerns and rich with meaning play, Bumblebees is a moving and necessary work. It will reinvent your understanding of extinction, and our relationship to each other, our world.
People Are Saying
“Meadows’ poems are striking events of encounter with the daunting complexity of earthly existence in the climate-changing present. Her poetic language is one of contrast and variation: alternately witty, moody, ironic, melancholic, and critically incisive. The variation in form and mood of the poems in Bumblebees continuously draws the reader into a sensory connection to subject matter or knowledge system: “acoustical measures of being sound me out.”
—Carla Harryman
Bumblebees resonates “vibratory life attach[ed] to skein of star life,” accumulated inventories working up the running start by which readers might escape the gravity of a planet that so weakly holds us. Are there after-lives to be found in the afterimages of our civilization—if not beehive of the invisible, then “nerve transmitter relayed” restorations from “last chance tourism near glacial limit?” Meadows’s lines stitch topographic contours through mountains of thrown out sound, hyphae reaching out to fellow artists, with mycelial kin drawing a collective map of California from the carbon museum of the future. In a time when too much is being built, this poetry, mesmerizingly, celebrates decomposition.
—Jonathan Skinner
For over two decades, Deborah Meadows has produced some of the most intricate and nimble poetry that I know of. No books (or even pieces) of hers ever look or sound the same. The discursive jump cuts in this new collection, Bumblebees, are startling. In a million years no one would guess what comes next, line by line, and yet, when the lines fall, it’s hard to think of the pieces in any other way. These crazy lush harmonics coupled to maverick metricalities are sure to please the most demanding of poetry readers.
—Rodrigo Toscano
"Vivid with specifics, with instances of lived experience, this is a work firmly rooted in an earth that is itself unstable. Meadows explores that instability, explores our own complicity, and yet with a generosity that seeks to embrace rather than to blame, and through that embrace, to achieve a more exacting engagement with contemporary cultural and ecological tensions. Through her evocative, kaleidoscopic phrasing, we're witnesses to a meticulous yet rangy accounting that demonstrates how language can be used to create new modes of accountability." —Cole Swensen
"The melancholy of a particularly cerebral struggle with the political, artistic self or selves is the dominant, rich tone of this book. Meadows's 'recuperative theater' (as she describes it) presents a broken world with cinematic flair — 'water treatment doesn’t work… people as pulled dandelions, for / mundane weeds, not people (in the manner of) unsettled nostalgia' — and is global in scope, perspectives ever-shifting as her meditations are turned askew by the pulses of the news, her own notes as a fraught witness, and a pantheon of unnamed voices. Art, literature, theater — Malevich and Sam Shepard are just the extremes of artists considered here — are particularly subject to Meadows’s phrase-based, 'disjunctive' (as we used to say) poetry but somehow integrated into the flux of struggle at the borders of empire: 'Where was Blake when we needed him? daughters of Albion living in tents in Samoa, South Africa, Trobriand Islands.' Meadows just seems on the go — these poems describe activities, working with materials, whether of the world or thought — 'How to let go of this world we love to see?' This is an exciting book that should work some magic on the 'theory-benumbed,' those 'vulnerable as molting lobsters' who 'could have been planning nonexistence for all the lack of enthusiasm.'" —Brian Kim Stefans
The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience—they are what infect the body. The poems in Translation, the bass accompaniment — Selected Poems are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others. Many have written of the mediated experience that language, private life, and civic life involve. In that spirit, the poetry engages the syntax of exploratory thought from ten earlier books brought together here for the first time and ends with a poem that hints at a version of tomorrow.
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