Kirjahaku

While trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary literary and cultural studies as an ethical way to study depictions of suffering, there is a risk that its present use could cause more harm than good. By emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory may lead readers to claim others' suffering through empathic identification. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry offers an alternative approach to engage with not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Examining the strategies of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant models of trauma studies in which readers take over the witnessing position by identifying with the speaker as a witness, thus becoming witnesses themselves. If the purpose of reading such poetry is to contribute new witnesses to a chain, what is the distinct role of a reader? How does this role differ from the speaker of a poem's role? Tracy proposes that metonymy - a logic of nearness rather than likeness - is compassion's formal manifestation. Analyzing poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing speakers invite readers. Poems that respond to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses toward a compassionate response to suffering that involves feeling with - not as - another. Following each poem as a unique theory of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems hold suffering signed as art, not claimable traces of suffering.

While trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary literary and cultural studies as an ethical way to study depictions of suffering, there is a risk that its present use could cause more harm than good. By emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory may lead readers to claim others' suffering through empathic identification. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry offers an alternative approach to engage with not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Examining the strategies of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant models of trauma studies in which readers take over the witnessing position by identifying with the speaker as a witness, thus becoming witnesses themselves. If the purpose of reading such poetry is to contribute new witnesses to a chain, what is the distinct role of a reader? How does this role differ from the speaker of a poem's role? Tracy proposes that metonymy - a logic of nearness rather than likeness - is compassion's formal manifestation. Analyzing poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing speakers invite readers. Poems that respond to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses toward a compassionate response to suffering that involves feeling with - not as - another. Following each poem as a unique theory of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems hold suffering signed as art, not claimable traces of suffering.

This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we've built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is-they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like. Unconventional but interested in convention, they turn the world in on itself until "[i]t's almost like a curtain / has been pulled and it's a different world. / A curtain has been pulled, but I can't see the curtain." Dale Tracy mines the intersection of the surreal and the philosophical, with a sprinkling of Samuel Beckett and a dash of Hélène Cixous. Tracy is a fresh, original voice in Canadian poetry, locking her startling surprises and beautiful enigmas in quiet but emphatic lines. Each poem in Derelict Bicycles takes things too far, to the edges of its own form