Michael Flatt

Chlorosis Michael Flatt

"So often our urgencies upend themselves into absurdities. Lyric turns to joke and then to pugnacious elegy. So in Flatt's and Mund's Chlorosis, a dying world becomes a dynamic collaboration. Given options that find us 'imping toward stasis, ' this poetry reanimates and throws color and light on a dimming horizon. Can poetry save us? Maybe not. But perhaps what we need now is sustenance, not salvation. Both slapstick and delicate, Chlorosis sustains the witness necessary to this moment. Now, in this 'fugitive dimension, ' we are borne on 'an absent violence, ' 'still and waking for that which we lack / from which to emerge.'"--Elizabeth Robinson

"In these poems, Michael Flatt and Derrick Mund flicker between digital screens and imperceptibly crumbling landscapes to create a series of nameless glances cast at a contemporary psychic abyss. Here, Chlorosis reads like a thread of linked pastorals--eulogizing the living room of a broken American heart--choked by sunlit swarms of dust motes and a soft, semi-urban dread."--Janaka Stucky

"Chlorosis is a moving experiment in the uses of the poetic 'we' in a time of crisis. It hangs tight--it usually means just two people. The component members of that 'we' write to each other, as each other, and for each other. And as they survey together a world in which there is no respite from the oncoming disaster, that 'we' becomes a tiny, nimble pivot for unexpected clarities and also for the testing out of tentative rhythms--both of which we'll all be needing, from here on out."--Christopher Nealon

With Chlorosis--a leaf disease in plant life caused by lack of light, literally translated as "green sickness"--Flatt and Mund explore the difficulties of finding and sustaining love in the midst of the various toxicities of the anthropocene: slow violence, environmental catastrophe, economic malaise, polluted cultural memory, digital abjection, etc. Alternating between lyrical address and objectivist observation, this collection of untitled poems also engages with voices from the fields of ecopoetics and new materialism. In this collaboration, the first-person pronouns break down actively, alertly, and unevenly, alongside generalized collapse. Love, however--humanist love, romantic love, brotherly love--is never far from view.