Amanda Paradise
In a series of mini-essays at the end of Amanda Paradise, CAConrad elaborates on the (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals informing this collection. One such ritual involved the poet having “flooded” their body with field recordings of extinct animals, and we learn that this eco-poetic practice centers “vibrational absence” in order to return the “music of the disappeared back to the air, the body, and the land.” What is summoned through these rites? Perhaps a collection composed of astrological dreams, arcane prophecies, and environmental spells to push “a daffodil back in its bulb.” In Amanda Paradise, past and future lives collide; entire epochs pass in one line-break; extinct bodies and feelings are resurrected so that CAConrad can reclaim a little more time(lessness).
Distinctive of the poet’s recent work, the amoeba-shaped poems in Amanda Paradise resemble Rorschach blots, unmoored from the page’s margins, often held together at their thinnest junction by just one connective word. These poems spill out onto the page organically, without punctuation, at times monologue-like, at others, conversational, reminiscent both of the call for revolution and of the casual, rowdy gossip between friends. These shapes become a bridge connecting the past and the dead with the present moment, while pushing back against state-violence targeting queer bodies and the natural environment.
Beyond the oracular unusualness and ceremonial performances, these poems also tap into a truly resonant poetic space of embodiment, particularly in the long sequence “72 Corona Transmutations.” By drawing parallels between their experiences of grief during the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, CAConrad allows for their “individual vibrations” to merge “with the collective.” To go back to a time when “everything / imploded / after he / died” is to “hold him / vibrating in / the middle / of a poem,” they write achingly. These seventy-two fragments, shaped like small trinkets or droplets, seem to whisper like an incantation, as they gesture toward a radical future, offering us a “pause / in the / heartbeat / of empire.”