The first parts blend the existential attitudes of Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire , in which the angel Gabriel elects to fall into humanness, and Joseph McElroy's sci-fi novel PLUS, in which a disembodied mind relays its dawning consciousness as it orbits the earth. Not yet blooming as aftermath, sequence stunned in a bud a blush of erasures, of prints. Someone, not me, was here dreaming of day, as of inclusion. On a Stair 's titular preposition, thereby continuing one of the previous book's projects. Then, in the poem immediately following, she lets the words, the vocabularies, speak mischievously for themselves.
Nothing is optional.
Lauterbach's poetry can be. If Ashbery, to whom she is often compared, bears an avuncular relation to Language poetry, then Lauterbach is a kissing cousin. Even the loose thematic clustering and segues that make a review readily readable may belie On a Stair 's unwieldiness. Excerpting and paraphrasing Lauterbach's work involves the elision of alternate possibilities she'd like to keep available, open. Suffice it to say that she evidently wants us to experience her work form-first, to sense its shapes before shaping a sense.