Ecotones

By Janet Kaplan

Poetry - Paperback

OUT NOW!

Ecotones, in the ecological sense, are places in which distinct natural environments and habitats meet and converge. Ecotones by poet Janet Kaplan contains bits and fragments of a life and its death, of perception and blindness, durability and ephemera, poetry and prose, fiction, search engine text and samples from Internet cites—confetti-briefness drifting, zeros and ones in time’s test-tube. The fragments converge and converse on the habitat of the page. They call and respond to one another. By placing our human and ecological conditions side by side in this way Ecotones shows that the human and environmental responses to stress are very much the same and that there is, ultimately, no separation or distinction between us that will matter.

Janet Kaplan has served as Poet-in-Residence at Fordham University and is currently a creative writing faculty member at Hofstra University, where she is Editor in Chief of AMP magazine. Honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has earned praise from poets and critics as contrastive as Dan Beachy Quick and Adrienne Rich. Kaplan's previous books are Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, The Glazier’s Country, The Groundnote.

"Extremely original, Ecotones rages toward meaning. “Signs, for example. No one should plan on them.” Piecing together “fragments from tablets” and “pixie pixels on the click-here’s,” Janet Kaplan presents us with “futuristic tropes” to give us hope. Take “Technopastoral,” in which she sees Kilmer through programmer’s code—we just have “to adjust to the language” until we “hit save and my software crashes”—irony brilliantly colliding with the quotidian. A convergence of history, poetry, narrative and science to celebrate, wikiquick!"- Terese Svoboda, author of Professor Harriman’s Steam Air- Ship and When The Next Big War Blows Down The Valley: Selected and New

"The personal. The citational. The chronicle. All the “conquistadorial spillage….” In Ecotones, Janet Kaplan pieces these verging environs. The writing is transitional; contemplative. We are reminded everywhere of how edges touch, how language is code. The poet has flipped the surface of the page to better show us a map of our disconsolate displacements. “Motion is the translation of a body from the place it occupies to another place,” writes Euler; Janet Kaplan: “and I, bit player, confessor-chronicler, / will write it.”  "- Edric Mesmer, author of Fawning and series editor of Among the Neighbors