Traceable Relation

Kimberly Alidio

To stay inside to attend to the more proximal inside. To feel the space of the marks. This is the shape of a poem in space, material ecology and architecture of language’s representation. This dyke’s rice rocket, decked out with an oversized rear view mirror, holding my face an overlay on the face of the one squeezed against me under the face of another sandwiched against me. A coupe slides across lanes rocking us back and forth across midtown, having left a dim room stretching the somatic sightlines be-tween femme knot and t-bird flock, a length of room littered with bodega roses and mixtapes of Ariel Rivera’s Christian love songs.

In the shape of the other is an asemic rendering. No such thing forming the legible axis. Ideological smogs of queer affect. Three Romantic teens and the orangest orange on the MARC. Low bun of straightened hair atop a navy field of white polka dots. I’ll read marks moving in any direction thinking about the energy of the clover. I know the ending, the twist, and watch the artist conversing with her dead mother in an ancestral home turned into a hotel no longer in the family’s except in memories. The hotel’s current staff doesn’t treat them particularly well, underscoring nostalgic displacements. Then the staff treats her tenderly once the conceit is dissolved and the projection falls away. Centrifugal force is a fictitious force.

Spend on schlepped linen, a living apple far from the site of its invention, all for modesty against the sun. Tyrannized and befuddled by objects, two bags and some pockets. I want to go freely of so many pouches of what-ifs and later-ons to stumble in the bardo, losing what must be lost

                               toothbrush
                               razor
                               poems printed for a reading gig
                               simmering burner
                               locked front door
                               parking without the parking brake

You’re supposed to be gone forty days out but you’ve asked to stay to play pranks.

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Kimberly Alidio is a historian, literary writer, and teacher. She has published five books of poetry and poetic prose; the most recent are Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions) and Teeter (Nightboat Books, winner of the 2022 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2024 Lambda Literary Award). Her recent essays and short-form publications include: Shared Discernments, with Rebecca Teich (1080 Press), A Teaching Summer (Spiral Editions), and “On Being Porous” in e-flux. With the poet Stacy Szymaszek, she lives on the unceded homelands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck (today the Stockbridge-Munsee Community), otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere. For more, please visit kimberlyalidio.com

"To read Traceable Relation is to enter the space of Kimberly Alidio's writing, where I am drawn through different voicings of grief, longing, and music (or narrative's) "blurred edges around a fact." Like a score interested in the history of sound—like Raven Chacon's—or one that courses through history making several variations on a theme—like Julius Eastman's—Alidio's book explores (and enacts) the past's framing of the present, lineage as a orchestral movement rather than notational device, dictum. I am both moved and changed by the ghosts this book contains, and the way a sentence can become a song, a screen, a record, another trace of utterance and love." —Alexis Almeida

At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In her ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from the diasporic arts of memory and survivance.

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