Laura Mullen's triptych "Bride of the Photograph 1839-1930", "Bride of The Bayou", & "Bride of the Photograph 1940-1944" are portraits, but along with giving us a visual and sensual impression of her subject matter, Mullen invites us to engage questions of objectivity and aesthetic worth. A line like this in the first of this triptych gets to the nature of an object's representation as image, before such a rendering takes place: "No one knows how to be recorded yet, no one knows how to act: for their transformation into image they are as earnest as painted supplicants at heavens gate." This is a fundamental and timeless question of artistic form and value: In what way do we create a facsimile of reality, impressionistic, conceptual, or otherwise, in order to give us a more valuable understanding of the world?

The warbling vireo, Vireo gilvus, is known for its unique song, which the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes as "a rapid jumble of rising and falling notes." This description also fits the featured writing by Neil de la Flor, which creates a poetic warbling, constantly changing and varying notes, tone, mood, and approach. The warbling of de la Flors’ poem, however, is not the lyric beauty of the stereotypical poems inspired by birdsong. This poem does not have the lines, rhythm, and most importantly song expected of lyricism. Instead of the perfect arrival of a beautiful spring, we read: "Meta enjoyed sex and a lack of context". The food is not the scrumptious, juicy berries found in the bushes at the side of the dirt road in the forest at the edge of the meadow, but burgers from McDonald's.

Thom Donovan’s poetry does not allow for distractions. Like notes with “Mirrors inside them,” Donovan’s lyrics reflect and distort the rhetoric we use to protect ourselves from ethical decisions. The effect manages to be profound and also beautiful—a high-mark for elegy in post-modern and post-human lyrical expression.

What drew me to the poems of Jamie Thomas was how the poet’s eye functioned. These poems are selective in what they reveal, and with that, are filmic. We only see what is presented in the shot. In both pieces, we enter into a narrative scene that plays out linearly and each progression or turn leads to its own quiet epiphanic moment. In “Dialogue in the Suburbs”, the camera moves in from an aerial overview of the topography of the suburbs into a close shot of the speaker grilling in his backyard. Thomas uses constant subversive threats illustrated by his clever and careful word choice in a scene that could otherwise be banal both in content and execution. It’s not a chain link fence, but a “cyclone fence.” At any moment, a storm could come and upend everything. This vanilla and planned community of identical houses and gridded streets resembles the “spines” of “prehistoric…fossils.”

Last weekend, after seeing the film Inception, I felt tremendously refreshed to come home and review Bonnie Nadzam's work. Whether you love, hate, understand, or remain befuddled by Christopher Nolan's film, it points to a sentiment in both popular culture and high art that seeks to reinvent or at least question the authenticity of "reality" by warming the world over with Cartesian notions of dream as reality or reality as dream within dream within dream within dream (last year's Avatar also attempted this with greater or lesser degrees of success). The common denominator here may, gasp, imply that the real world is passé, twice-told, and has been mastered, explained, and understood, and therefore the frontier lies in the imaginary, the subconscious, and the virtual in order to better demonstrate, through art, the "real" world.

Adam Strauss seems to answer everything in the first line of his first poem below: "Because I am". In some sense we could stop here, because what else is there? To stop here, though, would be to miss what makes existence the wonderful happening that it is: to be obsessed by the glam-ness of John Ashbery, to see the exact hues that Paul Cezanne painted with, to drink oolong tea, to consider the necessity of the moon, to think of Barbara Guest in the lines "...but, dear now, 'as full as store' / Remains and an emphasis / Falls and the more / It does...". In these poems, stopping is not an option. The world moves and things change and the mind continues to think. In a series of line-by-line, phrase-by-phrase tangential, projective moves, Strauss takes us over vast tracts of space, from an obsession with John Ashbery to wine lists to one's nerves; from a wombat to looking out a window to silence eclipsing speech; from responsibility to losing a moon to resuming small talk.

Claim and Reclaim concludes with a selection from Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo. This text takes as its source material the 9/11 Commission Report and might be more accurately regarded as a kind of sculpture or carving, effacing large sections of text and leaving only certain details legible. In this sort of “constraint” poetry (for lack of a better term), political critique coincides with form: the source text is altered and, in alteration, subverted. However, it would be a mistake to consider this selection merely a political treatise; works like The O Mission Repo begin with language’s materiality and play with its slipperiness. Listen to the music, repetition and lyricism it has discovered in the daunting and dry pages of a government report. Like any poetic form, its constraints demonstrate that claims don’t exist in the ether of absolute truth; instead, each claim is vulnerable in its materiality to the reclamations of other artifice. And, in this case, we are lucky for what Macdonald has reclaimed.

Because it usually takes its source material from another language, register, or dialect, translation is inherently an act of reclamation. But no form of translation excites me quite the way homovocalic translation does. The reason is that homovocalic translation preserves the vowel sound sequence in a line but permits a degree of openness with everything else; sound is reclaimed but it is used toward the construction of entirely novel lines. Gale Nelson’s homovocalic translations of Shakespeare should strike you as familiar and strange at the same time—Hugh Kenner once quipped that Shakespeare was the only poet whose diction could never be predicted, and Nelson’s poetry preserves that excitement. But Nelson’s work is also strikingly original, managing to address topics as varied as city and keel in the span of one line. What emerges is something borrowed and something new, poetry that reclaims one aspect of the past to reconsider the present.

If I could go back in time, I would have taken a minor in Biology. Why? Because biology gives us Latin, graphs, and specimens to understand the inherently incomprehensible: the otherness of other creatures. Kelli Anne Noftle’s poems could be called an enchanted science, seeking to reclaim the sense of wonder and weirdness lacking in more typical forms of scientific inquiry. Her work straddles a desire to know something absolutely and an equally strong reservation that no claim, scientific or otherwise, can entirely exhaust mystery from the universe. Noftle’s poetry is particularly enchanted with that moment of scientific suspension opening us into the infinite, if only in the form of distance. It is my empirical opinion that this is an experience worth reclaiming.

Craig Santos Perez’s work serves as a compelling introduction to this week’s theme: what is reclaimed after occupation, modernization, integration? Having just returned from a family trip in Hawaii, I found these poems wonderfully uncomfortable to read. They stick with you. They don’t ask, but rather demand, rereading. Experiencing Perez’s poems is much like hearing one’s voice replayed from a hidden and aged recording device: when it is played back, we are indicted by the content but intrigued by the rich textures in sound. Through verbal collage and appropriation, Perez shows that reclaiming is a reassembling of what has already been claimed.