body of the bather, Ethan Fortuna

July, 2028

body of the bather wells from a faith in language as autonomous substance and in poiesis as collaborative being. Culling a tensile, amorous, and mercurial lexicon from the fields of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics, the collection delicately forms a refuge from the ontologizing grammars and damaging language norms we are, for our survival, coerced to reproduce. Attuned to the delicacies of phoneme as subtle phenomena, some of body of the bather's poems are shaped as if every letter were an autoerotic fractal, a lacy arrangement of materiality's libidinal substrate. In other poems, typography gathers in snow garlands; roguish metaphysical longing branches between spatiotemporally disparate scenes of writing; butt plug shaped sculptures of negative space ebb against dualistic understandings of materiality; hysterical masculinities in drag king variety lovingly glint; the brutalized angel of the Cartesian grid slips from tautology; the wet, trembling letter of Saussure’s semiotics joins a prismatic collation of bathing bodies or becomes the lambency of embodiment as mist; and enematic grain overflows its trough… Written across a period of gender transitioning and voiced from the author’s negotiations with chronic pain and illness, body of the bather seeks alternatives to the merciless logics of biopolitical control to celebrate intimacies and embodiments beyond "the human."