I Am This State of Emergency by Robin Myrick (Critical Studies MFA 08) | Image courtesy of Surveyor Books
Robin Myrick (Critical Studies MFA 08) dissects the fraught and highly divided political climate of the US in I Am This State Of Emergency, the first title published by Surveyor Books.
I Am This State Of Emergency is a 135-page collection of poems that dial up the strident soundscape of contemporary American politics, and examines the heightened tribalism, electrified debates, and strained personal relationships with which the nation currently reckons as a result. At a time when many refuse to listen to each other, Myrick emphasizes the importance of lending an ear with “uncompromising care.” From Surveyor Books:
Composed over the better part of a decade, these poems feature many different speakers. Sometimes those speakers broadcast, sometimes they receive, and sometimes they trigger their sirens simultaneously. But, no matter how cacophonous the results, author Robin Myrick listens with uncompromising care. In the process, she reveals the raw human emotions throbbing beneath our politics’ ostensibly authorless talking points.
Fellow writer and CalArtian Stephen Van Dyck (Critical Studies-Music-IM MFA 09), author of People I’ve Met From The Internet, shared praise: “Myrick has brilliantly imploded the bumper sticker stick-it-to-em, unearthing the true slogans of our time, a puzzle of contradictions, double standards, ironies—even thinly concealed hurt—and a devotion to the divide itself.”
Myrick is an experimental artist and educator whose work engages the rhetoric and convergence of identity, politics, consumerism, performance, and disaster. Her photography has been featured in group shows at Dallas-based Steve Paul Gallery and the Ro2 Art Gallery. In 2015, she curated It Came From CalArts, an exhibition hosted by CentralTrak at the University of Texas at Dallas. Myrick’s writing has also been presented at a 2011 edition of the &Now Festival of New Writing.
I Am This State Of Emergency is available for purchase at Surveyor Books’ official site.