Mcgill-queen's University Press
unfinishing
About this book
they come flying out from under your expectations / and once opened it is rain / and thinking a sandbar / always inventing a different script / never where you left it
This dream book of kaleidoscopic, holographic, mutagenic poems is haunted by the loops, aporias, and entanglements of time – memory, forgetting, oblivion, fortune telling, eternal (or not) returns, timelessness (however that may manifest), beginnings and endings (if indeed there are such things), and other spectral speculations where the intimate and the outward might exchange places.
With imagery both striking and nuanced, and language rich and strange, Brian Henderson encounters a hummingbird, a barred owl, a flood, a trapdoor, a table of contents, an empty rowboat, a nonexistent river, a room made of crystal, a heap of broken furniture, ecocatastrophe, and political debacle in mesmerizing poems that celebrate the strange and vertiginous musics of a kind of memory-ness invoked by the irretrievable.
These poems ask how the future can exist in the now, the now in the past. What is a future? How might we recognize one? And although the now may be completely empty, what are the selves we seem to become? In the archeology of now, unfinishing asks who we might have been – and who we might yet be.
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Front Matter
i -
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Contents
ix - Prolepsis
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Anicca a Jan-Ken
3 - Vanishing Houses
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Apranihita
7 -
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Vanishing Houses
9 -
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Lobelia cardinalis
10 -
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Translations from an unknown language
11 -
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Imaginary Interval
12 -
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Phantomancy
13 -
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And if I look back
14 -
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After all this time
15 -
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Texts (at the end of the world)
17 -
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How light we are becoming
19 -
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So this is what it was like
21 -
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Combers
22 -
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On what is in the first place
24 - Interference Patterns
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Out of the fabric of knowing
27 -
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Interferometer
29 -
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The time it takes shadows to fall
31 -
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Mutagenic
32 -
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Bent water light something
33 -
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Hold the phone
34 -
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On afterlives
35 -
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Veiled through revelation
36 -
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Water is the home of knives
37 -
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At the edge
38 -
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The Architecture of Falling
40 -
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More Misunderstandings
43 -
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Sheets of rain
46 -
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Somnolent dusk wheel
48 -
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I’m talking to you tonight from radio nowhere
49 - Fortune Teller
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A key in the shape of a kite
53 -
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Dwelling
55 -
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Expect Bilocation
57 -
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Knocking
59 -
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No Hesitation
61 -
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Anahata nada
63 -
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Entheogen
65 -
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Phase Conjugation Mirror
67 -
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Unfinishing
69 - Present Perfect
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Sunyata or the reason we thought things were happening
73 -
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Key of moonlight
75 -
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Nightvision
76 -
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In the oblivion world
78 -
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Trance Accumulation
79 -
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Commemorative
81 -
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Speechless
83 -
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Raft
84 -
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Ohm
86 -
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On losing and finding
87 -
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Catechism
89 -
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What the deer know
91 -
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What every stream knows
93 -
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Photograph at Evening Looking west out to sea
94 -
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Chromatic chatter
96 -
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There is a way
98 -
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The moment
102 -
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Final Report
104 -
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Spectral Data
103 -
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Notes and Acknowledgments
107