Deus Ex Machina: A Melodrama

Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Kelsey Street Press FIRSTS Contest. "Jennifer Pilch's DEUS EX MACHINA pulls the ache from a fractured century, stitching the bloom past artifice into an urgent, prismatic form unlike any we have seen. Each voice 'risks/transforms night' into 'a blossom that punctures that blots.' A book like this, assembled from music and ruin and light, is rare and necessary." Joshua Poteat

"In DEUS EX MACHINA, Jennifer Pilch crashes classical tragedy into melodrama, foregrounding the parameters of representation in an analog of early photography's impact. With lush language, she explores the photograph's obviating violence, focusing on the 'taken' part of the picture and the lens's seizure of sensory mechanics. Working at varying distances from the stage, the page, and the photographic image, her historical characters successively worry the line between romance and fidelity, presence and preservation, and contend with a colonizing mode of 'perception stuck to where there's light.'" Kate Colby"