Deep City

DEEP CITY renders the city and the body as architectures in crisis. The poems explore the city and suburbs as container and contents of collective memory and investigate how space shapes the body/ how we create space. They examine language and identity in the pathology of late capitalism, with its unaffordable housing, healthcare, and educational systems, exploitive labor practices, and continuous violence on its citizens. DEEP CITY captures city as site for these myriad interactions, locating the body in space in relation to people, animals, architectures, and technologies. The city also becomes site to explore the self in relation to its urban exteriority, working to question the limits of the construction of self and subjectivity. Riffing on themes of urban decay, suburban housing developments, and the works of Julia Kristeva, Young Jeezy, and Honoré de Balzac, DEEP CITY explores what happens when narrated identity becomes both essential and unbearable.   Megan Kaminski is a poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020), Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012) and two artists books, Prairie Divination (Sunseen Books, 2022), a book of illustrated essays and oracle deck with artist L. Ann Wheeler, and Quietly Between (A Viewing Project. 2022), a co-authored collection of poetry and photography. Her place-based sound, poetry, and art installations have appeared at museums, public gardens, and libraries across the country, and her poetry and essays regularly appear in literary magazines and journals. Her social practice includes two edited volumes of nature poetry and art, as well as hundreds of community workshops, place-based poetry walks, and community readings, talks, and performances, all centered on co-creating with and within our ecosystems towards community connection, healing, and liberatory futures. A Professor in the English Department's Creative Writing Program and in the Environmental Studies Program with a courtesy appointment in Visual Art at the University of Kansas, she works at intersections of queer ecologies, plant studies, somatics, and ceremony. Her creative work and scholarship are informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, plant biology, philosophy, and theology, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations.   She writes, 'what if I split it open / melon ripe and red / let them all out' but there is no 'what if' about it as these beautiful poems dispatch us around the world where everyone awaits. The vivid reimagined anatomy of the page in Megan Kaminski's brilliant Deep City is host to the unexpected 'slide from languid to louche' listening with our enthusiastic ears. You will be wild about this book with me!" - CA Conrad "In Deep City Megan Kaminski continues her role as cartographer of desire, of longings both 'feudal,' futile, and refined. Her delicate poems loiter at the intersection of bodies and letters (both alphabetic and epistolary), where objects and imagination collude. Kaminski's poems beautifully illustrate how our sense perceptions insistently puncture through even the most rational arrangement. Deep City—not so much a place as a literary pleasure." - Jennifer Moxle