A Complicated Piece of Machinery with Numerous Possibilities for Injury

Early Praise for A Complicated Piece of Machinery with Numerous Possibilities for Injury

"William Carlos Williams once defined a poem as 'a small (or large) machine made of words, ' and poet Maggie Cleveland's A Complicated Piece of Machinery with Numerous Possibilities for Injury memorably fleshes out that possibility by revealing that the heart itself is fabricated with switches and terminals, erotic charge and electrical voltage, plumb wires and infinite resistance. Separated into five sections-or floors-this book rises from an intimate look at the mechanics of elevators up through a series of compelling erasures of a public document on manufacturing accidents and finally onto the rooftop of a long poem that channels Charles Olson or Rachel Blau DuPlessis but that remains utterly distinctive in its evocation of an external and internal landscape perpetually decaying in time, where memory is a 'rough rope net' and our waters are 'almost safe for swimming.' Simultaneously canny with warning, structurally ambitious and deeply personal yet universal, Cleveland captures the scale, the tumult, the thrill and the quiet of contemporary life in a remarkable first book of poems."

Ravi Shankar

Pushcart Prize-winning author of 17 books

"This inimitable book asks: How can we live organically in a world that seems to be falling apart? The speaker of these poems is challenged not only by personal history, but also by the physical environment in which this history takes place and challenges this personal history. Disasters, both natural and manmade, create a world on the precipice. This world out of balance is created vividly on the page. But more: this world is created with an energy that borders between destruction and resurrection, between chaos and joy. The book ultimately asks us to comb through our individual lives and the lives of the things, both animate and inanimate, that surround us. A Complicated Piece of Machinery with Numerous Possibilities for Injury introduces us to a poet who is, in a word, necessary."

Kenny Fries

Award-winning author of In the Province of the Gods and In the Gardens of Japan

"With a quiet wryness and quickening around what makes life electric, these poems are Maggie Cleveland's heirlooms. Whether through environs of the inner workings of elevators, landscape of Laurentide ice, or combusted relationships-that lost Victorian Prostitute Couch-whether in a series of erasures or wide-cast net of the book's final achievement, its long sequence centering a span of cosmic in cellular connections, the sensibility is always transporting and wise, her perambulations of mind admirably able to handle the understated as well as oracular. I particularly feel the way they 'take the weight of the loss and cast it against// what's left, ' providing much care to notice."

Douglas A. Martin