The poems in Afterworld, loosely incorporate
bee flight patterns in relation to botanical language and ideas of séance. I
wanted to engage with language in the way a bee engages with flowers, in terms
of movement, erratic and erotic. Formally, aspects of repetition, spatial
relationship, caesura, collage, and chanting come into play.
I began to think about viruses in narrative. How
various hatreds or phobias arise from and spread through the spell cast by a
single sentence or story repeating and replicating itself throughout a culture,
how origin stories, mythologies, and fairy tales unfold to reinforce cultural
ideologies.
In Engadin mythology the human soul is said to turn
into a bee upon death. I began to create experimental embroideries as a way to
speak in threads or lines that were non-linguistic. In order to grieve for the
bees, becoming silent, becoming swarm.
Andrea Rexilius is the author of Sister
Urn (Sidebrow, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine,
2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To
Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011). Her chapbook, Afterworld,
appeared earlier this year with above/ground press. Her creative and critical
writing is featured in the following anthologies: Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre,
The Volta Book of Poets, Sixty Morning Talks: Serial Interviews with
Contemporary Authors, and Letter Machine Book of Interviews. She is
Co-Director, and Core Faculty in Poetry, for the Mile-High MFA in Creative
Writing at Regis University. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at the
Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
