Cosecant Hyperbole

Written in the aftermath of a protracted illness and the sudden loss of two friends who had been companions on an intimate journey of healing, Marchionni's poems enact a generative conversation between the abstractions of mathematics and the polysemic openings of poetic writing (and artistic practice in general) in an effort to loosen their entanglements with the most devastating vectors of contemporary technological and economic reasoning. The vicissitudes of a body vulnerable to pain, disease and the educated guesswork of biomedical protocols constitute the experiential background of each poem, whereas a grounded sense of the deeply enlivening and relational dimension of aesthetic experience orients each poem's discernment towards building worlds governed by an ethic of responsive care rather than consumptive use.