Poetry examines how cities, individuals experience crisis

LAWRENCE — For poet Megan Kaminski, a University of Kansas assistant professor of English, it's important to understand how economic and environmental conditions have created everyday lives of permanent emergency.

“While the financial industry and the small portion of citizenry in possession of capital have since recovered from the recent economic recession, that recovery has been on the backs of the rest of our individual bodies — now even more challenged, weighed down and crippled by unending economic crisis, ongoing police violence and environmental catastrophe," she said.

Her new book, "Deep City," published by Noemi Press, explores both the city and body as architectures in crisis and how the city and suburbs serve as containers and contents of collective memory.

It's her second book and a continuation of her ongoing work exploring space, the environment and human demands. The poems examine individual and collective identity in a world in crisis.

"My hope is that by creating an intense space and world for the reader to inhabit that it might push the reader to feel differently about the way that we interact with each other and the way we interact in space," Kaminski said. "I want to make the reader more aware of the ways in which we're very much shaped by the systems around us and how we might reimagine and change those entities. I am committed to the possibility of the poem as a site for compassion, healing and resistance. "

Prefaced with an epigraph from “Put On,” a song from rapper Young Jeezy’s album The Recession, Kaminski’s book draws inspiration from his music.

"I’m inspired by Jeezy’s display of resilience and pride — the power of the individual voice and body — in the midst of a city crumbling around him," Kaminski said.

She also engages with philosophy and literature, including French novelist Honoré de Balzac's depiction of the flâneur, a figure who casually observes the city around him, retreating from it at whim.

"In some ways the book is really a rejection of that stance, the idea that we can have a detached relationship with the world around us. I don't think that's really how most of us exist," Kaminski said. "We might want to pretend that we do. But I think we're constantly under pressure. That's what I'm thinking about in terms of crisis."

In the next few months, Kaminski is also giving readings and presentations and visiting classes at Gonzaga University, Washington State University, the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, California State University at San Marcos, the University of Buffalo and Northwest Missouri State University.