Critical Commentary
Andrea Rexilius' SISTER URN is a requiem both intimate and broad in scale, memorializing the life of a sister cut short and the unraveling aftereffects of the anthropocene, "difficult to pin down in objects, and therefore unnamable." Here, poetry is an act not only of holding space for grief but also for restitching what has split or frayed into a raw-edged resolution: "When the future is missing, I will reside in the letter I. I will abide by it, even if it topples over." —J. Michael Martinez
NEW ORGANISM: ESSAIS, by Andrea Rexilius, is a book written at the site of fracture. And what is more radical than to document the attempts hearing what lay just beyond the reach of the subject? The female body is here. The body emerges from the ground “carrying roots in her mouth.” The body is woman, and the woman is multiple, unsayable. She is the lyric — the “I”—interrupted, ruptured, and doubled: “an appearance of a disappeared self.” NEW ORGANISMis truly a book of its own agency, continually churning and refiguring itself “between the not yet and the no longer,” leaving poems in her wake that leave the reader clamoring, clamoring for more.
HALF OF WHAT THEY CARRIED FLEW AWAY is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, somewhere between concept and place, sometime between primordial and the everyday. Or it is scripture, yet to be consecrated, telling of a group always at the margins, peripheral, transitory, and engaged in a migration one might sense abstractly – “a material that reorders the shape of a room” – but will never define absolutely. Even when Rexilius's speaker discovers “official definitions of who they are,” the reader is no closer to any such conclusions.
It's in these embodied contradictions that Andrea Rexilius's text shines. Here is a difficult and disorienting record of characters, and the impossible facts of their existence. Here is a history, fractured and disparate. Here “is a landscape, it has a beginning. It fastens and unfastens from top to bottom.”
