Defensible Space/If a Crow--

Experimental poetry that embraces shifts, adaptation, and the unknown as a means to move beyond old and dying worlds.

Considering how we might detox from old languages, systems, and modes of life, Ian Lockaby’s poems seek out new forms of interconnectivity and possibility, finding the energy of emerging worlds along the edges of ruins. This collection poses questions of how to thrive in aftermaths, suggesting that attempts at absolute knowledge are less powerful than an embrace of the unknown. Throughout these poems, Lockaby uses crows as a model for dynamic adaption and creative entanglement with the world and with language, finding ＂defensible space＂ for new lyrical syntax amid shifts and desolation: ＂Everywhere a burning root system. Everywhere, a root fire crowing off the splayed tail feathers of a crow.＂

Defensible Space/if a crow--looks towards a reintroduction of fire into wilds and wilds into our lives, taking the unknown of an ＂if＂ as the base from where we can build life.

Defensible Space/if a crow- won Omnidawn’s 2022 Poetry Chapbook contest, selected by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

Ian Lockaby is a poet, translator, and editor of the journal mercury firs. He is the author of the chapbook A Seam of Electricity, and his poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Ecotone, Volt, and Denver Quarterly. His translations of Latin American poetry have been published in Black Warrior Review, Circumference, Washington Square Review, and others. For many years he lived in and around Olympia, WA, where he worked on vegetable farms, and he now lives in New Orleans.