January Machine: Stahlecker Selections

January Machine is a book-length poem comprised of sonnets and sonnet sequences interrupted by static. Rooted in the modern American moment, this poem seeks to understand the intersection of Whitman’s plurality and Oppen’s “shipwreck of the singular.” In the midst of geographic dislocation, the lyric “I” becomes a place; “I am the I undone, immersed / in perspective,” Schlegel writes. “I am an American sigh, a limit / of language, a limit of privilege, / in this excess, a thousand exits.”