“I’ve been writing about limitation, its frustrations, and the ways that the forces of the unexpected, of excess, can sometimes break up everything I understand, even limits that had begun to feel safe. Because I want to live these experiences in the writing itself, I created a form that demanded I experience these challenges directly—you’ll see that each line in the poem that is my own line is seven syllables in length, but all italicized phrases are quotes from Maurice Blanchot and those do not conform to the other lines’s syllable count—the quotes ‘flood’ out of any constriction of syllabics. I chose the quotes before I began writing this poem, so as to let the unexpected quality of their tonalities disrupt my ways of seeing and saying (reading Blanchot always disrupts me, so I wanted to live that experience in the poems).”
—Rusty Morrison