5On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, by poet and historian of early modern art Jennifer Nelson, makes exquisite trouble. These poems give voice to Nelson's encounters with turbulent surfaces, from the twisted spectacles of the contemporary world--geopolitical, epistemological, and local--to esteemed artworks inseparable from the legacies of colonialism.
Faced with the asymmetrical warfare, incessant pandemics, and climate calamities of the 2020s, these poems offer no simple solace. With wit, they plumb the wrecked relations between academic knowledge practice and any sort of liberatory praxis. They reject the manic digital buffet proffered as antidote to the poet's anger, guilt, and grief by late techno-capitalism's cultural productions.
Gazing into and grappling with the act of seeing, these poems blaze a path through forests of data and life, the ensnarled techno-webs of information and plunder. Here, the poet allows us to see beyond what and whom first meets the self's eye. Here one may press into the "loam of the forest floor, / the ongoing of those--unremembered / and those remembered wrong."
Though it may be the case that "the world is dying," this book's hope is that we may, at least, persist in a form of radically productive negativity: "Let being and making/be the fullest/forms of grief." Jennifer Nelson's deep knowledge, care-for-the-world, and capacious attention infuse this collection and the reader with wavelengths of bracing and inclusive light.
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies was selected for the 2024 Ottoline Prize.