Placed in the context of ongoing moral disaster, PLACE is a discussion of language and poetic usefulness, specifically how collective discourse survives the unimaginable through personal recourse. It examines the ideology of cultural superiority and intellectual migration in public squares and private homes. With skepticism and love, this poetry and poetics attempts to explain the failure and potential at the heart of revolutions: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a communal existence across time. It is meant to speak, with many voices, beyond these known failures and into our many futures. It is a defense of the art of poetry as a means to evoke the necessary accommodations human beings can make to survive what is unsurvivable. These political and/or personal poems demonstrate the culture-bound logistics and flourishings and shortcomings of certain poetic voices during the Cuban Revolution of 1953-59, the Cultural Revolution in China of 1966-79, the Civil War of Lebanon of 1975-90 and the Arab Spring in the MENA region of 2010-11, as well as ongoing revolutions in the lands currently known as the United States and Canada. The poems center around healing these wounded places in the often more ambitiously universal interiors of the psyche.
Alexei Perry Cox is a writer and teacher and organiser. She is the author of Night 3 | اليوم الرابع (Centre for Expanded Poetics), Re:Evolution (Gap Riot Press), Finding Places to Make Places (Vallum), as well as the full length collection Under Her (Insomniac Press). Her poetry and criticism has graced the pages of a wide variety of publications, including Jouranl Safar (جورنال سفر), Arc Poetry Magazine, Moko Magazine, Carte Blanche and The Georgia Review. At the core of her makings is the belief that we imagine relationally, sometimes with words and sometimes with graze.
"Alexei Perry Cox leans into philosophy, linguistics, history–both recovered and imagined–and geography in an effort to understand herself, to place herself. Ghosts across time and language translate and retranslate themselves into a multi-lingual lyric weave. It's global poetry, sophisticated in thinking and structure and construction but raw and immediate in its import and impact."
— Kazim Ali
"Reading Alexei Perry Cox's PLACE for the first time I felt that rarest thing in poetry: the presence of a totally new voice. Or rather, I felt the presence of a totally new chorus of voices – brought together by Perry Cox – singing together in one language, in many languages, in Spanish, Arabic, English, Farsi, French, Mandarin, in joy, terror, history, beauty, physics, family, land. It's a wildly ambitious book, and the miracle is how boldly, capably, it charges into its ambitions, meeting them, often (impossibly!) exceeding them. Perry Cox writes, 'All my blood does is run headlong into life;' then she shows us."
— Kaveh Akbar
"Cross out 'place,' and think instead of what sort of poetics may emerge from unceeded, stolen, or lost land. Alexei Perry Cox's new powerful collection is written from a place that isn't one; a site that eludes borders. A diasporic and anti-nationalistic locus that insists on summoning ghosts. Perry Cox dexterously orchestrates multilingual conversations between historical and contemporary figures via citation and translation—two inherently relational practices. Revolutionary archives are re-organized into formally intricate poems, reminding us that '… embracing a newfound freedom is embracing the freedom to imagine it' (Rinaldo Walcott cited by Alexei Perry Cox). What results is an associative and at times dreamlike linguistic terrain capacious enough to hold the trying nature of revolutionary hope. In the company of so many, Alexei invites us to join an assembly in which imagining another form of citizenry together is momentarily possible."
— Mirene Arsanios
