Self-Portrait as Chimera in a Convex Mirror

Poetry Chapbook

Pages: 35

ISBN: 978-1-957746-25-8

In resurrecting and expanding the Oulipian form of the chimera, Trevor Ketner in self-portrait as chimera in a convex mirror and other poems creates a lyric vessel for magical juxtaposition and connection. The long poem at the center of the chapbook employs the syntactic DNA of John Ashbery’s own Convex Mirror; it scaffolds the accrued language of Ketner’s abiding interests in natural and domestic spaces and demonstrates the rich potential and play in contemporary procedural poetics. A mix of formal innovation and tradition, experimentation and pattern, self-portrait as chimera in a convex mirror and other poems may be best described as a tenderly constructed ritual in train-hopping across its imagined poetic landscape. By combining language across eras, cultures, disciplines, and aesthetics, the poems herein suggest that, given we are the culmination of the causes and effects that preceded us, we are each perhaps chimeras ourselves.