Properties

Poetry begins when the properties of things — and the correspondences among them — reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself. The poems in The Properties record encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.