New Organism: Essais

I am a girl, and what does it feel like to be a girl. It feels like a hand over your mouth. A hand over your mouth and on your thighs. Some say it is the sound of a rabbit before it is caught. It is the sound of the sky before it comes crashing down.

NEW ORGANISM: ESSAIS, by Andrea Rexilius, is a book written at the site of fracture. And what is more radical than to document the attempts hearing what lay just beyond the reach of the subject? The female body is here. The body emerges from the ground “carrying roots in her mouth.” The body is woman, and the woman is multiple, unsayable. She is the lyric — the “I”—interrupted, ruptured, and doubled: “an appearance of a disappeared self.” NEW ORGANISM is truly a book of its own agency, continually churning and refiguring itself “between the not yet and the no longer,” leaving poems in her wake that leave the reader clamoring, clamoring for more.