Mourning an Interior Country by Aaron Dargis

To speak of the haunted clarities in Mourning an Interior Country that Dargis deftly draws into the light of his (and our) insight, I turn to Rosalyn Diprose as she quotes Nietzsche: …in assuming the other is the same as the self, one reduces the other, one takes from the other, “deliberately and recklessly brush[ing] the dust off the wings of the butterfly that is called the moment.” Dargis avoids the ensnarement of such reduction by advancing word by word, in language attuned, with almost extra-sensory attention, to receive the moment as it is given. He relies on no normative representations of experience, even as he mourns the loss of those too-easily-believed precepts regarding who and what we are as humans in relation to each other and to the natural world. Read Dargis if you have the courage to let “mourning” awaken the unpredictability of this moment.

–Rusty Morrison, author of the true keeps calm biding its story which won the James Laughlin Award, Academy of American Poets in 2009