Hermaphropoetics, Drifting Geometries

“In this new riveting long poem, Rochelle Owens shows herself once again to be our mythographer par excellence, the inventor of the rich and strange.  The germ of Hermaphropoetics, Drifting Geometries seems to be a single photograph of “A hermaphrodite /Captured after the siege . . . Seated on the stump of a tree.”  But who or what is this mysterious figure “staged and scripted from /a lost narrative?  Using ten interlocking geometric perspectives—from angle and circle to zigzag and zoom—Owens recreates her visionary tale again and again, each time making us question the previous version and arousing our longing to know more.  In what siege did this man/woman participate?  From where is she/he exiled and what agonies has this human spirit suffered and survived?    The kaleidoscopic narrative, encompassing ceaseless struggle against the natural world as well as the full gamut of desire and defeat, is mesmerizing in its delicate repetitions and variations, the whole tale rendered in condensed and oblique linear units.  This is a bravura performance by one of our most original and daring poets.”

Marjorie Perloff