eBook The Steam Sequence epub

How difficult a topic to tackle is The Holocaust and how many angles the approach towards it--and yet Carly Sachs attempts it again with what could have only been a solid certainty of the riskiest, most urgent art. The challenge in the politically and moreso within the trafficked-political, is to make what is already so charged feel as aesthetically high in voltage as it is in its terrible truth. The Steam Sequence comes to us already vaporized, with words lightly (and lit) hung in the air of its pages the way of dust and ghosts. It seems deeply right with a genuine grief that is not exploited or exclaimed but rather strung across the horizontal layout of the page. The poems are full of space and the language is spare. This is a beautiful photograph of an unspeakable image that has been shot again and again but never from this angle and rarely so right.

What do you do when the foundation of your existence is not only annihilated, but lost and forgotten? Carly Sachs has produced a stunning account of an individual putting together an irrational, criminal and inhuman event in the life of the narrator, which cannot be repaired in any other way. Her sparce and barren language reflects the basis with which the narrator must reacquaint herself with one word at a time. Instead of a confessional tale of being lost in an abyss, the symbols within this book give the reader an objective foothold in finding a way out. If you like Louise Gluck and Elizabeth Bishop, The Steam Sequence too reaches for the elements. It does not only have to be read in the historical context of the holocaust, but provides a story of anyone, anywhere, at any time, who has faced the destruction of reality.