Near Before and After

Abstract

How can you live in the present when the present is dead? Often travel writing centers itself around the belief that positioning yourself in foreign environments is the disconnect necessary to connect—connect with the environment, with others, with the self. Traveling does unlock another tempo of living, but it is an escape from the present into transient time and space. I have been preoccupied with this living and writing in media res. Nothing holds. Everything bleeds. In an attempt to capture this ephemerality I used a projector to throw my poems across darkened landscapes and roadways, waiting for the others also traveling through these limbo places, to step into the beams and render my work. The final product is Near Before and After, a collection of long form, concrete, and visual poetry that questions what it means to leave and return, and replies with a text that pushes forwards, while not necessarily moving onwards.