Review of John Kelsey,’s I Forget
Reviewing John Kelsey’s book-long poem I Forget, Kolya Shields considers how poetry’s engagement with mass media has shifted since Joe Brainard’s 1970 book I Remember, arguing that regardless of digital techno-optimists’ fantasies of a total archive, poetry attests to memory’s imperfection as a strange sort of presence or re-finding. Contextualizing Kelsey’s book in a contemporary pattern of spare, phone-addled memoirs, Shields questions whether the preponderance of this ‘pathetic’ literature might be a minor abdication of historical responsibility, submission to claims of the ‘End of History,’ or simply a neurotic symptom of a rather hopeless emotional economy.
Link to I Forget: https://www.semiotexte.com/shop/p/i-forget
Kolya Shields is a writer, artist, and childcare worker in Providence, RI. She has a poetry chapbook, Extra Limbic System, out from Almanac Press, and writes in Orion Magazine, Shelf, and the Providence Pit. She enjoys extra-large blueberries, footwork music, and the smell of benzene.