Inclination Drawing by Miriam Atkin

Poetry, 30pgs
2024

In Miriam Atkin’s Inclination Drawing, nonce tones and gnomic missives drift in and out like smoke through “skeins of light.” The poems in this chapbook were written after the onset of an autoimmune disease which caused an odd form of cognitive impairment in which Atkin felt as if her mind were constantly circling the same assemblage of thoughts.

Inclination Drawing delights in the textures of these “rafts of things” as they accumulate new parts, jagged and wriggling. Slowly, we wind and wend through a second Catskills of dream, lit up in stray flashes from the inside. Time doesn't quite pass here—rather, it's like the landscape grows larger and stranger while also remaining the same, teeming with berries, beakers, beaks—“streaming abundantly socked / the life of jillions.”

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Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based writer whose work concerns the possibilities of poetry as a medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music, and dance. She is cofounder of Pinsapo, an international publishing collective, and teaches writing around the Hudson Valley region, at Bard College and the Otisville Correctional Facility. Her podcast, Specific Objects: Talks on Art in the Catskills, airs monthly on WGXC 90.7.