Howdy

Here's a description of a manuscript I very much want to get published:

Hello, it's Adam Strauss. I am submitting an 81 page (title, acknowledgements, and section pages excluded) poetry manuscript titled Braided Sand Country. Both sections of this collection--Braided Sand and Country respectively--primarily consist of sequences, but these strands are not ordered sequentially and instead constantly interrupt and/or twine one another. This dynamic has been chosen in order that relation be emphasized but not simplified, turned step-by-step--elegantly straightforward--rather than web, matrix, field of lapses, overlaps, integers, gaps that turn into rungs, ladders for lungs to scale and set circulation free. The content of these poems works to define as fully as possible what country means: how the term compasses the "natural world," fields, mountains, streams, coastlines; designates the small-scale, the local, the "provincial," and the large stage that is the nation-state; how geography turns into geopolitics and framing for culture. In the pleated reality of this term, mountains are no longer solely mountains: they are zones for extracting product for export, for GDP growth; they are contested territories--shadows cast by their peaks are themselves shadowed by ongoing eructations constituting nation-states' (or, sigh, perhaps only states') identities.