Alicia Rabins Alicia Rabins Alicia Rabins's Platzpoems willfully blur the boundaries between the acts of speaking out of a moment and speaking of a moment. Each poem is in and of its place at the same time. For the reader, there is no resigning to description of event or place, but rather the delight of engagement with a moment in time and place. I think these poems are a way of articulating the porousness of consciousness.
Place plays-as in speaks to, informs.
Others, in the corporal sense, are often present along with the speaker, and the magic of these poems is that they insist we feel, recognize, and adjust to the jostling, as well as the jockeying for physical, mental and emotional place. Rabins's own notions of subjectivity are constantly being challenged by the surround sound of the poems' origins of place. Maybe it's in this conscious shift of accommodation of self to place that the poet's own process of association and movement unveils itself. There in arbitrary flame-is my best zither. My friend, look at the wood grain, oceanic in many ways, it lets what rears its head lay back.