Synopsis "Incognitum"
"What pleasure, what an incredible joy, to enter into this stunning museum, this rich and mesmerizing collection. Marrin's first book is a requiem, a gorgeous and strange diorama of beauty and sorrow. A true cabinet of curiosities, these poems usher in a seemingly endless list of what's been lost: Marrin, along with her parade of ghosts of dead counters, explorers, and collectors, chronicles our demise. 'Come into my diorama, ' Marrin whispers, 'Everything's life size. / Everything's as it should be in the wild.' Incognitum is an extended fever, an archive, a getting-it-all-down-before the world is gone." -Cynthia Cruz"Incognitum inhabits several worlds at once-from the subterranean past, to the surface of our present condition-and affirms with a dexterous line poetry's ability to synthesize a limitless breadth of information. I'm fascinated by how disparate elements appear in tandem throughout Incognitum, suspended in place by the sound-waves of Aubrie Marrin's charged-up language." -Joseph Massey"A stratigraphic catalog of catastrophe, Incognitum takes refuge in a 19th-century naturalist's clinical relationship to nature, where order and classification palliate our global, systemic approach to the taking out of nature all together. The violence of taxidermy, bone-dusting, the pinning of wings begins to feel like the tenderest love as things are caught and held in a seeming sort of life, while 'the great pupa / of loss // stirs in its jar.' Fossils and fresh asphalt accrue in Marrin's racked notebook that tries to create a scale for large-scale destruction..." -Kate Colby
