‘Unexpectedly Human’ and ‘L’Eclisse’

This work comes from a forthcoming poetry collection called Rolling Windows (Roof Books, 2026) concerned with media archaeology and ecology, migration and translation. ‘Unexpectedly Human’ endeavours to render capitalism’s abstract processes into glimmers of visibility in the shifting landscape of logistics and supply chain management, converging the co-opting of natural resources for the purchase of technology with the outsourcing of intimacy in network capitalism, the desire to capture and contain with the entropy of memory, a shift signalled in the poem’s formal movement from verse to prose. ‘L’eclisse’ uses the tempo of cinema as its organizing structure of 24 frames, signalling itself as a piecemeal and fragmentary remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film crosscut with the found footage of personal and familial pasts. In mobilizing the aesthetic contours and staging of video to illuminate aspects of craft rooted in a multimedia and multilingual poetics and shaped by migration and dislocation, my hope is that ‘L’eclisse’ also conveys a broader conceptualization about how diasporic writers may have to move between and across modes in order to tell parts of a larger story in different ways, alternating frames, languages and lenses.