Vestigial

VESTIGIAL is a flesh epic braiding time and bodies. Poet and librettist Aja Couchois Duncan writes, “The story of evolution is a love story” and, here, the land, water, and air function as organs in her lovers’ mercurial anatomies. Duncan renders her characters in a language binding them to a natural world, such that science and myth become twinned. The result is a poetry of precise resistance to worldviews that insist on cleaving the human from the environment. At scales simultaneously intimate and monumental, the poet resists the figurative to orchestrate eros, violence, and corporeal transformation. “In the epigenetic drift, she is alternating between ancestry and an impossible future tense,” Duncan says of the VESTIGIAL's odaanisan. She could very well be saying that of her own visionary poetics.

— Douglas Kearney