Michelle Detorie’s personhood is generous, sensitive, vulnerable and alive and this energy translates into empathic, visionary poetry. Her project chips away calcified human-dominated logics in order to disclose energetically connective understandings along animal lines. She establishes animal familiarity through heightened apperception: touch, listening, intuition and language sharing. Humancentrism is an ugly, violent and unsustainable condition—we live within the consequence of the fallout of human fallacy—of behaving as if other than animal, apart from nature. We exist within the continuing legacies of racial, sexual, ecological and economic violence, legacies exacerbated by the conceptual underpinning “human” and all of its hierarchical baggage. Michelle’s poems critique as they transform, casting spells for renewed interplay of sensory exchange within a commons that includes all of life and matter. “All communication is interspecies communication” is the central tenet of Michelle Detorie’s poetry. And she has a word for somatic calibration that has to do with relationality amongst animals: metafur.
METAFUR: A Fur-word. An interspecies “being with” that creates an interdimensional conveyance via poetics. Through the presences and engagements of multiple, creaturely intelligences, a quantum petaling through multivalent spectra. Sensate plasmas. Augments collaborative, co-created, intersubjectivities. Enacts a syntactical shift from a coherent singular sense of self into the complex flux of interdependence; which is to say: it’s political (feral). Can inspire clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairtemporance, and sensitivities to chimera. The occurrence of any of these effects can become more frequent, more intense, and more sustained with practice and/or an animal familiar. (http://entropymag.org/on-interspecies-communication-field-notes-on-the-metafur/)
Daily we understand in ever greater detail how compromised the ecosystem is and what this means for any sense of a future in which diversified life can flourish. Michelle Detorie’s vivid poems take account of the complex interconnectedness that being demands—she writes from the standpoint of passion and justice. Her poems are bio plans and visions for relations in the face of precipitous conditions. The body in all its materiality, ontology underpinning and desire is involved at every level in her work. Meridians, houses, moons, reflections, prismatic depth, spectral vision, floating perspective, transmutation, interruption, planetary activity, emotional structures, feminine power, other animals, feral energy, travel, mystical intervention, magic, alchemy, fire, wind, dirt, earthliness, texture, daily life, ritual, incantation, gnosis, roots, vines, tendrils, blossoms, illogical splendor, crisis, crisis management, knowledge acquisition and emotional valence form the spectrum of her thematic focus. She uncovers the heretical image with blazingly direct focus and quicksilver immediacy.
Engaging with Michelle’s manifold spirit I am constantly reminded that the near future (an extension of the continual present) demands total participation, action and commitment. As Donna Haraway reminds, involvement is uninnocent, messy and perplexing. I’m committed to a feral solidarity as Michelle proposes and rewilding sociality, the imagination and material life.
METAFUR: A Fur-word. An interspecies “being with” that creates an interdimensional conveyance via poetics. Through the presences and engagements of multiple, creaturely intelligences, a quantum petaling through multivalent spectra. Sensate plasmas. Augments collaborative, co-created, intersubjectivities. Enacts a syntactical shift from a coherent singular sense of self into the complex flux of interdependence; which is to say: it’s political (feral). Can inspire clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairtemporance, and sensitivities to chimera. The occurrence of any of these effects can become more frequent, more intense, and more sustained with practice and/or an animal familiar. (http://entropymag.org/on-interspecies-communication-field-notes-on-the-metafur/)
Daily we understand in ever greater detail how compromised the ecosystem is and what this means for any sense of a future in which diversified life can flourish. Michelle Detorie’s vivid poems take account of the complex interconnectedness that being demands—she writes from the standpoint of passion and justice. Her poems are bio plans and visions for relations in the face of precipitous conditions. The body in all its materiality, ontology underpinning and desire is involved at every level in her work. Meridians, houses, moons, reflections, prismatic depth, spectral vision, floating perspective, transmutation, interruption, planetary activity, emotional structures, feminine power, other animals, feral energy, travel, mystical intervention, magic, alchemy, fire, wind, dirt, earthliness, texture, daily life, ritual, incantation, gnosis, roots, vines, tendrils, blossoms, illogical splendor, crisis, crisis management, knowledge acquisition and emotional valence form the spectrum of her thematic focus. She uncovers the heretical image with blazingly direct focus and quicksilver immediacy.
Engaging with Michelle’s manifold spirit I am constantly reminded that the near future (an extension of the continual present) demands total participation, action and commitment. As Donna Haraway reminds, involvement is uninnocent, messy and perplexing. I’m committed to a feral solidarity as Michelle proposes and rewilding sociality, the imagination and material life.