Living Room

Laura Bylenok's poems in Living Room explore the lived reality of other organisms and kinds of life, using biology, genetics, and neurochemistry to explore the interior spaces of grief, motherhood, mortality, and self. They consider model organisms and an experience of self and world that cannot be objectively quantified, and the impulse is to slow down, see, and feel.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 01 October 2022
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Laura Bylenok's poems in "Living Room" offer a deeply phenomenological and ecological perspective, exploring the lived reality of various organisms and kinds of life, including animals, plants, bacteria, buildings, and rocks. They delve into the permeability of human and nonhuman experience, intelligence, language, and subjectivity. In particular, the poems consider model organisms, nonhuman species studied to understand specific biological processes, diseases, and phenomena, as well as the experience of self and world that cannot be objectively quantified. The impulse of these poems is to slow down, to see and feel, and to listen closely. Language becomes solid, palpable as fruit, and long lines propel breath and push past the lungs' capacity. Life at a cellular level, synthesis, and symbiosis is revealed through forests, fairy tales, and vines that grow over abandoned houses and hospital rooms. A living room is considered both a room that is lived in and a room that is alive, with cells being living rooms. The poems explore interconnection and interplay, and the network of poems becomes a linguistic rendering of a heterogeneous and nonhierarchical ecosystem, using the language of biology, genetics, and neurochemistry alongside fairy tale and dream to explore the interior spaces of grief, motherhood, mortality, and self.

Weight: 150g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 6 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496232366