Distinguished Office of Echoes

From renderings of sea creatures to maps of ancient battles, Distinguished Office of Echoes collages its way through history, seeking new unknowns. A hybrid collection of three collage-, cutout-, and erasure-based poems, Lisa Olstein's Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the visual and the linguistic, the revelatory and the strange. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates explores the moment of death, of sudden loss; a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human versus geologic time, time of war versus time of river and sea, an 1865 medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness to reclaim the voice of the examined. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts--their taxonomies and lexicons, rhetorical and printing styles, assumptions and elisions--to cast a feminist gaze on outdated histories and methodologies. New intimacies arise. Pages pulse with the magnetic pull of material fascination as Olstein studies, cuts, collages, erases, layers, transforms image, point of view, and the poetic line. As each poem reconsiders what it means to examine and to be examined, the universe undoes itself, our knowing unravels.