Half of What They Carried Flew Away
by Andrea Rexilius
About Half of What They Carried Flew Away
Poetry.
Half of What They Carried Flew Away is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, somewhere between concept and place, sometime between primordial and the everyday. Or it is scripture, yet to be consecrated, telling of a group always at the margins, peripheral, transitory, and engaged in a migration one might sense abstractly – “a material that reorders the shape of a room” – but will never define absolutely. Even when Rexilius's speaker discovers “official definitions of who they are,” the reader is no closer to any such conclusions.
It's in these embodied contradictions that Andrea Rexilius's text shines. Here is a difficult and disorienting record of characters, and the impossible facts of their existence. Here is a history, fractured and disparate. Here “is a landscape, it has a beginning. It fastens and unfastens from top to bottom.”
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Excerpt from Half of What They Carried Flew Away
They are marginal. They move in rivulets.
They exist not only in their details.
They contain their own extraordinary destiny.
They live beside a family of small farmers.
They are discovered and decide to emigrate.
Their name is William.
They are born a little girl.
About the Author
Andrea Rexilius is the author of Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) and Séance (Coconut Books, 2014). She teaches Writing & Poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.