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Forgotten worlds, words, and events converge
in this work to give image to the harsh reality of what was done to a
people in order to make this land "America." Always forceful, challenging,
and yet with the subtle beauty of repetition of word and thought, Brennan
offers a view of how the west was won, and what we have all lost in the
meantime.
afterword
Body group move onto a piece of land and take it. How the ground, Wounded
Knee, claimed and yet the dead taken there--say? Are they taken or taken?
Who? The soul when it leaves a body is said to be taken. If so, what is
not taken? What would it mean to be truly taken by a body--mine yours?
But a body is here.
Beowulf the ms. made of skin. In places burned, erased, rewritten, cut.
used as a chopping block or cutting board. The hols in the poem collect
nations and cultures. Editors and scholars try to suture the holes with
textual emendations and textual analysis. Used to justify the poem's position
as the ground of Anglo-Saxon national literature. Used to justify the
claims of the Anglo-Saxon race for privilege. To justify massacre. Yet
the holes also open the position or situation of the poem in history and
culture. Where it is itself taken.
Beowulf is not the poem Taken. It is in the way in which a poem is a body.
shot through.
--SB
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