Displays

Katherine Franco

Displays has theoretical commitments, even if only to a “birdlike, brained” logic. Katherine Franco’s debut collection attends to sibilants, the system of signs, and sainthood in a kind of half-joke. Displays features a subject who wants to be “good” and for desire to be delivered through a well-formed critique. She likes explication. Then, she doesn’t.

Deriving its terrain from the classroom and the open road, Displays demonstrates how poetics is a source of knowledge and flight. The collection is dogged for a thesis, but instead finds itself amidst practicums, biopolytechnicaltechniques, and acts of renunciation. “Likeness is like / flying,” Franco writes in one of the book's final poems. Flight need not mean an abandonment of politics, pain, or one’s daily life – the collection suggests – but instead the generation of a landscape where play and poetic experimentation reign. There, we can discover the restless epistemology distinct to Displays.