"Let's say the young radical Wordsworth wrote his autobiographical epic in a world of backyard skate ramps, Drano, ski shops & heroin deaths. Let's say The Prelude, a poem Wordsworth described as 'the ante-chapel' to 'the Gothic church' of a never-completed 'Philosophical poem,' was reborn as a recursive splatter of blood, or as a corpse opened to reveal a writhing screen of television static. For French Revolution read: overturned police truck. For the sublime read: panic attack, or LIVING IN THE CORPSE THAT FLOATS ON THE SURFACE. For poetry read: a utopia where we would all be inventors, innovating methods to keep our friends safe. Marty Cain writes against and through Wordsworth's rural lyricism and toward the end of property, while also recognizing that in the cathedral of capital, the lyric is the rose window, the highest reach of our unliving conditions. The Prelude is a frame, Cain writes. these were the fields assigned to me. These fields form a riotous subgarden, arrayed against the gardens and golf courses of power." -- MC Hyland, author of Diary of the Plague Year (Back cover)
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.