Caught Lacking

In Aleksey Porvin's visionary and timely book, Caught Lacking, we find not only a poetry of protest in an age of heartbreak and disgrace, but also, more surprisingly, an incisive and powerfully imagined exploration of the clandestine elitism and reification of boundaries that haunt the language of the political. Here we find lyric nightmare and marvel, the figurations that signify inner life, as modes of engagement, laboring to expand a kindness of attentions via acts of identification while honoring the otherness beyond the mirror. As the author states, "Only by becoming a shaving, only by laying down like sawdust/ under the bodies of people, is it possible to absorb their sweat, their words." Conscience thus argues for splintering of national and personal identity - a vulnerability native to the interpenetrations of imaginative life - to break the cycle of aggression and cradle a more credible accord. A great gift to find, at this time, a book of such sobriety and harrowing beauty. A book, therefore, of hope.

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