I imagine I been science fiction always, Erick Verran

Central in Douglas Kearney’s latest collection of visual poetry, I imagine I been science fiction always, would surely be the question of who in America gets to be speculative. But speculate on what, about whom? Isn’t speculation for stock brokers and horoscopes? Kearney’s work harkens to everybody from Russell Atkins to Susan Howe, Roy Lichtenstein to László Moholy-Nagy, in whose abstract canvases, almost invariably, a diagonal rod of color tilts into the composition, as though the scaffolding for an unseen building were in the midst of collapsing. Comicstrips stripped of their characters and impossible, off-center schematics tug-of-war in this new book, Kearney’s ninth, vying for a paper territory in which there is no hierarchy save for size, no focal—vocal?—point. Or as his epigraph, taken from the poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, slyly deflects, “I just wanted to write some fly shit.” He sure has.

Erick Verran is the author of Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021) and a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. His writing is forthcoming or appears in the Times Literary Supplement, the Hopkins Review, the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, the Harvard Review, Literary Matters, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Massachusetts Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City where he is the Book Reviews editor for Quarterly West.