Here, Which Is Also a Place

“In Mark DuCharme’s lyric, labyrinthine poems, place is effortless, but presence may be impossible. ‘Word is fact,’ but ‘We don’t mean anything.’ Confronting the connections and conflicts between nature, desire, and language in the Anthropocene, DuCharme refuses stasis. Place, time, and people mimic ecology: renewing, evolving, continuing, evanescing. In a world where a city waits ‘to be born in the crevice of forest’s shadow’ and anyone can ‘become undone by tender rattlings of the stars,’ DuCharme reveals a multiverse of Here. Steeped in sensation and unfolding at the speed of nature, this collection is ‘an ultraphysical / non-memorizible / event.’”

—Michele Battiste, author of Waiting for the Wreck to Burn

“‘The fierce invasions which are my eyes take me where the poem needs to go,’ and so on into the brilliant ontological scrutiny of Mark DuCharme’s Here, Which is Also a Place. And where does the poem need to go? To the farthest reaches of our global disease, and into, among and around our physical bodies, day after day. For what is a body but a time-in-place vessel, always already in relationship with other planetary bodies? The key is in the title, Here (a spatiotemporal concept) contiguous with Place, where we actually live. DuCharme’s poetry seeks to limn the connections, imagine the invisible: ‘To inhabit a space between futures / To erase the past unkindly / Decimating species, the earth’s weight / Filled with scenes I’ve never been in.’ Physical and metaphysical, lyric and ecopoetical, DuCharme’s ‘legible domain’ is a granular balm in the middle of things, on ‘this earth [which] is not yet won...in this place, where skies are burning.’”

—Matthew Cooperman, author of NOS, disorder not otherwise specified

“A contemplation of the ways elemental events can flash directly in/as language; how a poem sails on, into, and through spontaneous expression on a feel, staying (mostly) ahead of commentary, even if ‘never to be won.’” Read (sail with) and see how true this poem stays to time and place and tongue.”

—Reed Bye, author of Fire for Thought

“Mark DuCharme is a gorgeous writer and thinker. We must read these poems slowly, selflessly, sometimes again and again to grasp their wisdom and for sheer pleasure. This work unfastens the mind. The breathtaking beauty and thoroughness of DuCharme’s language and the vividness of his images draw us into prescient truths about the tangled realities of human life on Earth and our relationship to Nature: the magic, the sins, and where and how they intertwine.”

—Jennifer Heath, author of The Jewel and the Ember

“‘The lyric is a form of thinking / As a map is a draft of place,’ we read in lines from Here, Which Is Also a Place. How to map what is here, the restless place of mind? In Marc DuCharme’s poetry, the ecological thought meets its match in lyric utterance, sung into the bones of the ear, ‘in the sunlight which divides us’ (the Sun in Mayakovsky). These lines use their feet, to run through a concordance—of the lists of things that arise and fall away, at every thought an interchange. As Jack Collom meets Emily Dickinson, who sought something larger than thought, ‘evening slips & burns’ amid the ceaseless ramification of dreams, past and future present. ‘If you can do anything else, awaken.’ If you can’t, then read this book: it will leave you wide awake.”

—Jonathan Skinner, author of Chip Calls