Jamie Townsend Reflects on the Ghost Ship Disaster, Finds Ethical Work of Madison Davis

Jamie Townsend reviews Madison Davis's Disaster (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016) for Open House, writing that the book, Davis's first collection, is "ethical work" that is "centered on the importance of not looking away, though we are so often biologically and politically maneuvered to do so." Earlier, Townsend observes that "Madison writes around, loops, repeats, postulates, collages, creates a pointillist structure – a book emerges from the ruin of one, like Bhanu Kapil’s discarded notebook in Ban en Banlieue that lays in a garden all winter, accumulating the effects of weather and time." More:

Writing in this aggregate space of ruin merges the body of the writer and reader together into an imperfect translation, into expansion and collapse, into the place where disaster is co-created in the moment of witness. Sections of Disaster include many infamous historical events, such as the Columbia Shuttle crash, the sinking of the General Slocum, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Yet by incorporating autobiographic writing, as well as elliptical philosophic arguments, repetition, and conflicting accounts, Madison manages to seamlessly remove the site of disaster from history, to look at it from a multidimensional perspective where time is as material as flesh, is moved through, touched and affected by a witness, but also touches back, subtly or exponentially changing our course. We progress through the book as through a void where both of these feelings are weighted, drawing us to an undefined meeting place in the middle. As she notes in the collection’s afterword, “It is in that liminal space that I was caught while writing Disaster, and what I can tell you now is that I don’t feel like an only child in the world even though my sibling has died, and it has something to do with living in that space, with surviving there” (65). Disaster provides continuity and connection through its bare survival in a space of uncertainty, drawing the reader into the perpetually active site of loss. As Madison echoes in refrain throughout the book, “There are more than I can hold up.”

The morning he planned to finish the review, Townsend writes in a postscript, he "woke up to the news that a massive fire had broken out at the Ghost Ship warehouse during a concert the night previous." His elaboration on the Ghost Ship disaster is poignant and helpful. Read it, and the full review, at Open House.