The Metabolic Poetics of Juliana Spahr's The Transformation

At Jacket2, poet and scholar Adam Dickinson looks closely at Juliana Spahr's The Transformation (Atelos, 2007) in an effort to discern what might comprise a response to "extreme acts of writing now being composed in the capitalist Anthropocene [that] are being performed by petrochemicals." More on this, and "metabolic poetics":

...Spahr’s book, which Rachel Zolf calls “a laboratory to exhaustively experiment with her ideas and feelings about US hegemonic practices,” is in part a lengthy catalog of the legacy of the passiflora (or passionflower) in colonial and environmental history, as well as in sexual, political, and artistic identity in the immediate post-9/11 American social imaginary.

Three American mainlanders have moved to the island for work (one of them, Spahr, got a job at the university). Their unconventional sexual and intellectual relationship, which they characterize variously as a three-legged stool and as a triangle, provokes them to think beyond binaries about margins, frames, and about the predicament of the passionflower and its effects as an invasive species. Originally named by Spanish missionaries who associated its unique physical structure with the Passion of Christ, the passionflower was received very differently by the Indigenous inhabitants of Hawai’i after its introduction in the late nineteenth century. Hawaiians instead call it “huehue haole,” which refers both to a smothering vine native to the island and to people who have come from another place. Spahr declares early on that her text is “the story of how the history of the island changed them, the story of the huehue haole and the tree canopy. It cannot help but also be a story about how they were shaped by perhaps being and perhaps not being perverts, but still it is more a story about three of them who moved to an island that was not theirs.”

Find the full exploration at Jacket2.