The introduction I wrote for Nicole Markotić's reading tonight at KSW's Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics series. 

Poet, critic, novelist and teacher Nicole Markotic writes fault lines of sensation. She pictures lapsed Mormons and ruminates Alexander Graham Bell in the 19th or 20th century, where telephone voices call problem bodies. Markotic invents the telephone all over again with sympathetic vibrations, memories, confessions, misunderstood gestures with tongue and femur. Syllables reverberate. So What? We say, So. Or perhaps there is no such thing as a prose poem. In any case Markotic begins with closure, begins the body, begins sin and stamp. In response we resist migraines and rhyme ourselves. We name books, tissue and disease, perverts and pleasure, prairies and reversal. Markotic is still our poet of pleasure; Markotic is the new normal.