A5, 136 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, softcover, 2023

Translated into German by Lotta Thießen

“I wanted to remember how to forget:

I found something I thought I knew well—

the colour of a childhood room; the path taken to school each day;
a pool of water collecting in the iris,

—took something: lines of a poem
or the pages of a book, placed them in these spaces
I thought I knew well.

I had to train myself, I couldn’t carry
all the pages—”

THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT​​— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life. 

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