In Montevidayo, Joyelle has written a piece explaining her concept of "ambient violence," in part applying it to my book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place and in part applying it to Twin Peaks and Sara Pahlin:
As the first poem, “The Seminal Union of Carvers,” opens up, we can see a kind of convulsion in which violence saturates and moves towards and away from the speaker’s body. He begins, “I’ve saved the best conspiracy theories for my own private genocide,” attests, “I was born to break and break again,” but when violence’s mark becomes legible, “I’ve examined the bruise on your thigh and it looks nothing like your pet.” This instability keeps the poem out of the safe gesture of critique. The speaker is saturated with violence and becomes a medium for violence. He makes media, stories, sounds of violence. “In my great debacle, all stories are starting to sound like Vietnam.” “logging accidents pale in comparison to/the things that take place in my capital when everybody’s looking. “In my capital”, in my basement, in my torso, in my ribcage, in my girlfriend’s cunt, in the Hispanic children, the sites of violence are interchangeable like the quarantine that will take my place. “[The military] think the truth is buried somewhere in the backyard of my body. They think one shovel will do.”
