Erín Moure

First published in 1999 in an edition of 300 perfectbound copies and 26 spiralbound copies lettered A-Z and signed, Pillage Laud is a lost cult item that now returns to print. As the 1999 edition announced, Pillage Laud selects from pages of computer-generated sentences to produce lesbian sex poems (cauterizations, vocabularies, cantigas, topiary and prose) by pulling through certain found vocabularies, relying on context: boy plug vagina library fate tool doctrine bath discipline belt beds pioneer book ambition finger fist flow. 

It used MacProse, a freeware designed by American poet and jazz musician Charles O. Hartman as a generator of random sentences based on syntax and lexicon instructions internal to the program; the program worked on Apple systems prior to OSX and is now in the dustbins of computer history. In 1999, the news was shocking: Moure’s poems are written by a computer. In 2011, now that everyone is a computer, the book can be read anew.

What is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else?

Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English?

I looked for women who had made and were formed by
migrations, and who were in some way marked ‘qustionably’
by the socius, and I examined what I could of the forms and
shapes of their migrations—

Moving through queer intimacy, memory, and displacement, the poems in this collection trace what it means to be pulled off-course—towards others, towards language, towards fleeting forms of belonging. Fragmentary and tender, Lateral Sway offers an account of how connections survive across bodies, borders, and time.

“Dear Reader, you have in your hands a gorgeous tumult of verse. It’s a tonic. A balm. A much-needed reprieve from all the wrong kinds of chaos.”
— Sina Queyras

“Lateral Sway explores the lyrical intricacies of human/girl relation and the beauty of the complexities that emerge. Seeking to make the lives of queer others in Poland visible alongside hers, Karpinski in the end is permitted to share only her own desires, leaving open the search for answers: how can we make space for others, when their stories are not ours to tell?”
— Erín Moure

Hannah Karpinski is a lesbian Canadian poet from Tkaronto/Toronto. Diving into intimate personal archives and collective memory, she writes about queer friendship and queer desire. You can find her poems in Commo Mag, Voicemail Poems, Ghost City Press’ My Loves: Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems, and elsewhere. Lateral Sway is her first book.