FARMING. AND THE LABOR OF MAN

Ryan Skrabalak

Altars, prehensile tonsils of an idea’s cessationand the singing fathers who sigh duress up-campaught they be flavor’s serious mutant sightly errorunder a Prius in silicone milk, crusted over?Gold beans shake their fragile gay and silver tears.Slender vetch, calamity in silver dreaming, allthe country’s lines segue from urine avenues.Don’t be afraid to perfume the earth with laborthat’s the genius of the deadhead grass. To put a cloudin a hectare of smoke. It mutates a fetal requiemof crackle next to the interest gained in sorrow.Say the name is sterile—torch it—no profits hereattack a leavened stipend of creeping. Flamed arrearslive inside the occult virus of the veined soillike a pastoral counterpoint: a sieve’s per annumexcoriates a humor of exits so plural

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Headshot of Ryan Skrabalak

Ryan Skrabalak wrote two books, most recently National Lube (speCt!, 2024) and several chapbooks, most recently The Orchids (above/ground press, 2025). He lives in “Kingston, New York” where he runs Spiral Editions, a poetry press and occasional tape label.

Cover of Levitating Scum by Ryan Skrabalak

A translation of Book One of Virgil's Georgics, written nearly exclusively to the 1992 Madonna album "Erotica." To question the rigid notions of literary, poetic, and cultural logics of both “successful,” “accurate,” and “translation.” To consider how these notions have historically served dominant ideological interests and imperial interests in the name of “accuracy” and “success.” Perhaps it is through failure, in the murky archive between successes, that we might begin to map alternate logics, logics shaped contra dominant ideology, logics shaped in a type of failure. To deflate the bloat of the pastoral; translating as a way to best illuminate the fluidity of the affective notions of the text, invoking a certain cultivar of heteroglossia--

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