UW News

February 13, 2018

‘Supply Chain’: New book of poems from UW’s Pimone Triplett

UW News

Pimone Triplett, University of Washington associate professor of English and creative writing, has released a new book of poems, her fourth. "Supply Chain" was published by the University of Iowa Press in late 2017.

Pimone Triplett’s latest book of poems, “Supply Chain,” was published by the University of Iowa Press in late 2017.

Pimone Triplett, University of Washington associate professor of English and creative writing, has released a new book of poems, her fourth. “Supply Chain” was published by the University of Iowa Press in late 2017.

Round Earth’s Corner

Take operation’s shimmy all the way back
to the spot where my hand on the fridge handle
unhands whole networks: PG&E pumping

its box-car’d, coal-jumped generators,
the hectic electric lending its bright idea
to last week’s Buddha Delight back there

gone bad. I hold the door open till the hum
starts. Cold seeps from the chamber. A shiver
now at the neck. Then closed, then the sidling

miles of cable keeping me connected, the metals
dug, welded, smelted from cooling cores,
bauxite and ore, beat to unairy thinness,

underground passages, new flanged steel.
All that’s rolled, snipped, fitted, piped
to reach my unit, me,  the paying customer,

heart thumping steady, veins branched
in need of these rivets, bolts, coils, rubber
tubes and tape. The sum trained to wipe neat

in a blink if dinner drips down the white
laminate door when the container spills. If
daily I worship, Power Service, before this coffin-

sized hole of near-freezing I take from, let me be
the thought you think, one synapse among the many
sitting down for this huge plate of food.

— Pimone Triplett

The poems, Triplett says, explore “the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled ‘supply chain’ that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and our age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world.”

Triplett adds, “Equal parts celebration and lament for the mechanisms we shape and are shaped by, this is a book of entangled voicings among registers of public and private, the intimate and the historical.”

In its positive review, Publishers Weekly said Triplett employs “playfully contorted language” as her poems depict “a self and a world formed by large-scale mechanisms and their effect on persons deeply entrenched in causal chains and the ethics of supply and demand.”

Major Jackson, poet and faculty member at the University of Vermont, wrote, “Of the poets I admire, I can think of no other who dwells as comfortably inside language as Pimone Triplett.

“As such ‘Supply Chain’ — like her previous volumes — finds her gloriously moving between fixed and subtle shifts of meanings, between what’s known and what can only be discovered through jubilant lyricism … (H)ere is a poet who unapologetically showcases the virtues of a complex, demanding art to possess that which haunts the periphery of our imaginations while she simply has fun with words.”

Triplett’s previous books of poems have been “Rumor,” (2009) “The Price of Light,” (2005) and “Ruining the Picture” (1998).

###

To learn more about Triplett and her work, contact her at 206-618-2163 or ptrip@uw.edu.

Tag(s):