WHAT AESTHETIC IS SILENCE? 
Sina Queyras
Don’t worry about me, my dear,
I’ve had enough death. It’s life I want, life,
More and more life.

Sina Queyras
When the truth raps too close I go fragment
Sina Queyras
What makes Plath Plath? The Colossus? All buttoned
Down and enjambed? Ariel’s biting through? The corset
Burst? Rising at once to bird height and anticipating
The crash? Syllables one on another’s heels? Becoming?
Eternity bores me, you write in ‘Years,’ I never wanted it.
What did you want? The piston in motion – my soul dies
Before it, and the hooves of the horses, their merciless churn.
The rude imagery in a rush, a burst from stasis, the mind
On a leash, blood berries dying to fly. ‘These last poems
Stun me,’ Anne Sexton says. ‘They eat time.’

‘The Ariel poems trace the short trajectory from being close
To wanting nothing, to wanting nothing,’ Janet Malcolm claims.
‘The journals and letters trace Plath’s struggle against clinical
And existential depression.’ Her ‘relentlessly humourless vision
Of herself as the heroine of a great drama gives her journal a verve
And a lustre that the journals of more restrained … writers
Lack …’ In other words, Malcolm notes, they are the various
Manic defences offered by a romantic imagination.

We are either victims of our imagination or our lack
Of imagination: either way, with or without
Adequate containment, we appear to be victims.

Sina Queyras
I am many separate things
that disagree with one another
and that is ok.

 translations of the same story
- jen campbell
I don’t know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

Jeanette Winterson
The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory…. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.

- Antonio Gramsci
Você foi o único que fez com que eu me sentisse fraca.
Mas estranhamente eu me sinto confortável... como se eu pudesse aceitar essa fraqueza.

What do I have to say
to myself?

My username
is invalid.

- Rae Armantrout
Low sun illuminates
a row of amber
pill bottles,

half full.

- Rae Armantrout
Passing obliquely
through the interface,

desire is refracted.

Rae Armantrout
Vale do Silêncio
- Rashid