Blood Machine

Blood Machine by KB Kinkel begins with a poem called "Well," in which the speaker peers down through an expanse of time-considering almost the three decades of surveillance, ecological destruction, xenophobia, and violence that have defined their adolescence and early adulthood-and asks, "how did we get here?" These poems of witness, excavation, and extraction sift through artifacts of cultural memory, beginning with the literal and aesthetic detritus of 9/11. They work to locate the present moment within an unfolding series of violences beginning with, or significantly informed by, the turn of the 'new millennium'-an event that coincides with the speaker's own coming-of-age and unstable transition into gender, adulthood, and citizenship. The poems in Blood Machine juxtapose languages that vary from deep time and evolution (as in "Transmigration" and "Recambrian"), to archival and found materials ("Paper, Recovered" and "[sound of water falling / and cars - ]") as a means of tracing a personal and cultural lineage to the present. Kinkel uses ekphrasis to engage with twentieth and twenty-first-century visual artists (Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Eric Fischl, Mona Hatoum) whose works explore violence and representation at the turn of the century, or who engage directly (and sometimes unintentionally) with the cultural narrative of 9/11. Not quite an elegy, and neither fully an archive, Blood Machine resists any one rhetorical mode for considering post-9/11 artworks and documentation. Instead, these poems ask their readers to look closely and continuously at one of many defining moments of twenty-first-century art and violence to see what has been omitted, and what such reconsideration might reveal about our present moment.