"Joshua Poteat’s new collection is a brilliant, unsettling, unclassifiable, and consummately strange sequence. Poteat possesses something of Joseph Cornell’s zeal to reconfigure but enshrine the ephemeral, and to make from the odd detritus of the past works that are at once exhilarating and elegiac. When we open Poteat’s Cabinet of Wonders, we encounter the work of a true original."
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace

Description

In this book-length series, poems with titles such as “Illustrating the theory of interference” and “Illustrating the construction of railroads” are paired with nineteenth-century engravings depicting phenomena from geology to astronomy to mechanics. Yet the poems relate to the images in an oblique rather than a direct way. Poteat uses this framework to construct a mysterious and engaging book that inhabits many worlds at once, bridging the real and the imagined, the traditional and the experimental, the surreal and the ordinary.

As each diagram and scene gives rise to a poem that intertwines the life of German artist and printer J. G. Heck—imagined, as little is recorded—with Poteat’s own, the book reveals a preoccupation with landscape that encompasses both the precision of Heck’s carefully labeled sine waves and brass devices as well as the eeriness of his depictions of skeletal hands or dogs tearing apart a wounded boar. Poteat’s intense…

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