SITE, David James Miller

December, 2028

David James Miller’s SITE is a multi-disciplinary work of poetry and film-based photography, set in the massive postindustrial floodplain east of the Mississippi River and Saint Louis, MO— sometimes called the “American Bottom.” SITE is made up of continuously recursive serial reflections, disjunctive collage, and photographic documentation to look at emplacement within the historical and environmental narratives unique to this landscape, but which can extend to America more broadly. Past and present combine, becoming a blurred reflection of ecological, political, personal, and even spiritual experience. These poems turn to the serial form to articulate the development of memory and perception, repeating and unfolding across time, expanding on what came before and changing. Slippages between one and the other proliferate and cascade. And while the photographs work to situate the poems, they also elude certain emplacement, as the photos also revel in slippage. SITE is a work of direct, lived experience that leaves us with more questions than answers. Where are we, what are we left with, how do we proceed? These questions are implicit to SITE and contemporary experience—an experience that often converges with and diverges from narratives competing for our attention, as they proliferate and cascade across the screens that light up our faces. As C.S. Giscombe writes in Prairie Style: “Always the first question is Where?” And as Augustine observes in Confessions: “There is no place, both backward do we go and forward, and there is no place.”