Proxemics

Free Verse Editions

Series Editor: Jon Thompson

Advance Praise for Proxemics

"Fluctuating accuracy" isn't all we have, isn't the best we can do. In Ashley Seitz Kramer's Proxemics, it is evidence of going through it. It is also what now is in a poem. These poems don't struggle with language failing and time passing. They take the difficulty of living and art-making in the now and show how a lyrical moment isn't a framed one. How lucky are poems to work in the impossible now. Grief, isolation, memory can restrict that fluctuating accuracy, but in Proxemics, the poet does not set a table: "[D]oes / fake fruit make you strangely full & sad too? Do you / imagine biting into it & breaking a tooth, or worse, / finding it easier & easier to chew?" - Carrie Oeding, author of Our List of Solutions and If I Could Give You a Line

Ashley Seitz Kramer's Proxemics measure the taut distance between the self and other. They limn the space between self-awareness and the flow of experience. They pursue emotional honesty beyond the point of disintegration to renewal. The speaker of these poems, like Dickinson's "Vesuvius at Home," enacts explosive emotions in crystalline language, showing how mindfulness makes grief, rage, and love bearable by bringing them into perfectly clear focus. - Lance Newman, author of Proverbs of Earth 

Description

The poems in Proxemics explore the distances-psychic, emotional, and physical-that shape our relationships with each other. These poems offer intimate encounters with grief, anxiety, loss, awe, and connection as a way to ask how we might move a little differently through the world, how we might even move closer. Across three sections, Proxemics traces subtle meditations on love, vulnerability, anxiety, sickness, and impermanence. One understated arc that echoes throughout the book is the illness and death of the speaker's mother. But the poems in Proxemics also widen beyond personal grief to consider more collective kinds of losses and grief that surround us across time and throughout history. "Seven Attempts at Quantum Intimacy," the central long poem that comprises section two, functions as an interlude that examines closeness and distance in a long marriage; the heightened spareness and enjambment of this sequence mirror the leaps, misses, and discoveries one might expect from decades of partnership. Influenced by everything from questions about science to embodiment to the ethics of attention, Proxemics asks-almost stubbornly-how we might remain present, open, and vulnerable amidst the "fluctuating accuracy" (of language, of our accounts and interpretations), and ultimately, how we could possibly notice much less "remember / everything / that matters."

Ashley Seitz Kramer earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in education from the University of Utah. Her creative work has been published in over thirty-five literary journals and won numerous awards, including the Ruth Stone Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, and the Mountain West Writers' Award. Her first book, Museum of Distance (2015), won the Zone 3 Press First Book Award.