Tragodia. Tome 1, Statement of Facts

No poetry book this year will be more disturbing - upsetting, unsettling - to read than Tragodia 1 : Statement of Facts, by Vanessa Place.- Steven Fama Vanessa Place, herself an appellate criminal defense attorney who specializes in sex offenders and sexually violent predators, has assembled a remarkable sequence of narratives, taken almost verbatim from court testimonies she herself reviewed : her cases are entirely "real." But what is the "real" anyway ? What is the difference between fact and the interpretation of fact ? Between fact and truth ? And what do these "true" stories tell us about the society we live in, and the way we apportion innocence and guilt ? Telling it straight turns out to be the most mysterious -and poetic- way of telling it there is. No novelist could invent horror stories as compelling -and puzzling- as these actual case studies. Statement of Facts is a superb piece of conceptual writing.- Marjorie Perloff You might have supposed that the hallowed technique of cultural appropriation had exhausted itself in the wake of the Duchampian ready-made, the spendthrift citations of Pop, Burrough's lapidary cut-ups, or the critical twist given to all this by New York postmodernism in the 80s. But by re-presenting appellate briefs of sexual offense cases, attorney-cum-wordsmith, Vanessa Place has come up with another take on taking. Here the uncanny juggernaut of the Law collides with the excruciating strengths and fragilities of victims, voice is overwritten by context, and morality by salient indignation. In other circumstances we would take our hats off, but given her profession, she deserves a citation. - John Welchman