After Dayton

The suburban world of After Dayton is radioactive, diseased and energetic in equal measure. It pulses and strobes with the exothermic reactions of modern science and the familiar everyday colliding: “battery-operated candlesticks still burn the secrets of Christmas.” These poems strive desperately to name, but objects and people squirm and metamorphose before them. Bodies and machines become indistinguishable: “diaphragmatic camshafts,” “anvils in my ears.” These poems offer us a strange and frightening animation, the phenomenal world alive in singular ways. This is, as Carrier writes at one point, “avant garde choreography.” Carrier has given us an innovative reworking of the lyric voice, unsettling what we can expect from lyric poetry. In the speaker’s own words: “It’s nothing I could have imagined.”