Poetry
ISBN 978-1-957746-23-4
p.82
 
2024 Gasher Book Award Winner
 
Holograms in the Field is an assemblage of five long poems, each of which is a meditation on modes of embodiment and mediums of co-animacy. Three ekphrastic poems at the book’s center dwell on the way bodies merge with their environments in Remedios Varo’s paintings, the way sound articulates the dissonances of being-with in a John Cage string quartet, the way “moving through the world is an act of embroidery” in a Trisha Brown dance. Two meditative poems grounded in methods of phenomenology frame the book, tracing and retracing how the self is a fold in the fabric of being, where selves unfold into particles in the fog. The book is an atmosphere study, an investigation of ecological moods, where everything is waves dancing with tonal interchangeability, where the sentence is a landscape stretching between horizons. Using the breath as a compass, and the breath-like long line as a practice, these poems wait for the exhale to spill the body into expanse.
 
PRAISE FOR Holograms in the Field
 
"Each of the long poems that comprise Holograms in the Field constitutes a zone or membrane of controlled experimentation ("a made place," like Duncan's meadow) wherein the rhetorics of phenomenology and scientific description get a bit freaky together.  There, purposely disorienting inventions like "gender drift" and a kind of hyper-ekphrasis are employed variously to complicate the apparent distinctions between self/other, figure/ground, sensation/stimuli, etc. as a means of discovering, trying out, and practicing new forms of relation.  The differences between the pointedness of attention and the expansiveness of awareness are sympathetic rather than mutually exclusive.  That any one of these poems might be the residue of a certain somatic-meditative process and ALSO impetus and/or guide for similar processes to be taken up by the reader in the act of reading is itself a holographic effect. What a pleasurable one!" Brett Price, author of Ordinary Dissonance
 
"Eliza Guerra is a philosopher of kinesis, a sylvan analyst of the soma. Here she gifts us an orchestral wisdom, constellating frequencies from moss and light just as much as Remedios Varo, John Cage, and the surf instructor who invites her to dwell in marine space by 'saturating it with [her] bodily matter.' What’s choreographed in this wondrous book is less the order of movement and more what Mei-mei Berssenbrugge calls the 'affinity between awareness and blossom.' Of sensory data Guerra writes: 'give it to me all messed up; try to sing it to me with style.' This haptic aphorist is who one reads in the morning to enter the day wearing a new skin." Aditi Machado, author of Material Witness
 
"In Eliza Guerra's Holograms in the Field, the reader is guided through elaborate rooms, multi-dimensional fields, and blooming forests, toward a horizon where perception and world are seamed all along their edges in 'radiant co-composition.' What if we and our environment are phenomena dreaming each other simultaneously into being? 'The outward-inward binary gets in my way,' writes Guerra, insisting on a luminous 'model of co-animacy,' on overlapping and mutually constituting identities for a self, a cloud, an ocean wave, a rose. This collection is a stunning affirmation of both physical matter and the imagination, a 'queer augury' in which everything is in motion, and all movement is a form of dance. This is a glittering and necessary debut." Cass Donish, author of Your Dazzling Death
 
 
Eliza Guerra is the author of the chapbook Feral Ecology (Bottlecap Press 2024). Her first full-length poetry book, Holograms in the Field, won the inaugural Gasher Book Award and will be published in 2026.