Review by Jami Macarty
With Bernadette Mayer’s record-keeping poetry and Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto by her side, Amy De’Ath offers Not a Force of Nature. Each of these feminist writers resists “acting in the spirit of the contract” and seeks a “release from form” imposed by systems of power.
De’Ath writes at the intersection of feminism and capitalism, poetry and critique. Conscious of class, gender, sexuality, and other capitalist categories and oppressive systems, De’Ath writes against a “culture of financial bullshit” and attempts to make room for “Different shades of grey.” She “state[s] categorically that [she does] not endorse / whatever it is / people don’t like about these others—”
Readers will recognize categories of form such as a sonnet and an email, but what if “work emails” are made sonnets? That may seem like a simple question, but the implications are complex, suggesting not only a subversion of written forms, but a change in categorical concept. De’Ath proposes this “alternative trajectory” of tradition and conformity to the reader without coercion. As she considers “changeable forms of praxis,” De’Ath shifts readers away from being passive consumers of her art to being active thinkers within it. That’s art! And an act of love! “Since LOve tackles DEbt, [De’Ath] will follow it to / the marrow.”
At the core, Amy De’Ath is a revolutionary, writing against narrow cultural and institutional parameters. She refuses to conform to economic systems of artistic reproduction. Instead, she writes poetry to “make a concept out of it,” enabling socio-political thinking and heart-poetic communication. She writes for “People who like [her]… don’t want to reproduce / Themselves that way or this way.” Amy De’Ath’s way vies for people “roaming free” and a poetry “made by human hands.”
Not a Force of Nature by Amy De’Ath. Futurepoem, Fall 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.