Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama by Sophie Sills

Its epigraph from Oppen (“The flaw, the gap which is the aware of being, tho it is within it.  The flaw on which being presses”) suggests the epistemological concern at the center of Sophie Sills’ Elemental Perceptions:  A Panorama:  seeing/hearing things and events in the world, how can we know what’s really ‘there’ – that being “with a pulse . . . without a heartbeat . . . [which] is unknown,” yet which seems to be “aware” of us, seems to “press” against us.  Sometimes using the language of science (“the neurotransmitter brings/ what is background up close”), or narrative (in a story never quite told – “We sat in her room talking about the connection of everything”), or a speculative postmodern ‘lyric’ (“All that is and was belongs to the anti-formula of possibility, to matter”), Sills ultimately finds her words are “inadequate to depict how/ even the empty is curved.”  And this is why and how her book matters, because it brings “what is background . . . up close,” shows how “In this way, the brain builds up categories that abstract/ the elements of the world” – “Mutable red sky/ Remembered in the red lakes”; and why also you should read it.

—Stephen Ratcliffe

One thing I really like about Sophie Sills and Aristotle is their shared sense that music emerges most directly from a sense of awe in apprehending the object. Or, more precisely in the case ofElemental Perceptions, a portrait of interiority silenced by the overtakeless burden of elements in concert which in turn overthrow silence as song. Do you think atoms fuck? That’s the crass way of reading Sills’ insistence on the body’s endlessly reducible parts playing out a drama in which theirconnection is constantly extinguished and constantly renewed. I read this astonishing work as that very drama disclosed in the realm of human exchange, battered by ideology into diffuseness yet arranging “coherence” itself as a revolutionary plateau. A plateau of necessity, and from the beginning, absorbed into the rhetoric of philosophical doubt: “I consent to a solvency of sorts.”

—Brandon Brown

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Sophie Sills completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College in 2009. She has published poetry and literary criticism in numerous journals. She teaches English at National University and works for a Jewish non-profit. Currently, she is the editor of the poetry magazine, the Peacock Online Review. Sophie lives in Los Angeles, and she is happy.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 62 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-026-2