Eyewear is very pleased to welcome American poet Cori A. Winrock (pictured) this Friday. Winrock is a graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program. She was selected as editor’s choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award and as a finalist for The National Poetry Review’s Annie Finch Prize. Her poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, The American Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, Pool & others.
Her first manuscript, Anti-Portrait at Flashpoint, was a finalist for the 2010 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. This past spring she was the Emerging Writer Fellow at Kingston University in London, where I was pleased to hear her read from her deeply intelligent, witty and innovative work.
Dear Exterior, or the opposite of factory is museum
An inverse. A bright white déjà vu:
a hand inside a head unraveling the public
memory. Step into the same freezing
corridor brimming with preservation
lines of object and meant-to-be-
seen. Here they are moving
statues, filled with quick-
silver, pressed in and around—the day
shift: apiary of us women in antistatic
coats, dipping our stove-hands into the chill
& circuitry; electro-chiseled humming
as we sip from the assembling
track. There are other blank expressions hovered
and hovering in midair, an un-buzzing buttoned
up by each particle of dust & plaster.
This statuary insists it is inventor. Marble turning
to us with one and another spectacle-
eye: the carve & sway of the in-industrial.
I touch the real stone-handed woman I
cannot unpeel the years
of these faces. Dearests, we stretch
across geminate hallways: a shriveled
parts-river graying into the relics-
basement. Still, even
in the thud of a recession
the archive swells—cell by cell
honeying us back to a self.
poem by Cori A. Winrock. First appeared in Caketrain, Issue 6.
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