Author’s statement:
Second Story of Your Body, a series of lyric fragments, seeks to write body—body that is always also a register of ecological collapse. Sex and song, symptom and sickness—the experience of body bears world, and world it.

Furthermore, as Giorgio Agamben writes, “The concept of the ‘body’ is always already caught in a deployment of power. The ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life” (Homo Sacer). Bare life: that which may be killed but not sacrificed (per Agamben). That is, that which, in the aftermath of its destruction, is not experienced as lost.

How might lyric, both register of and response to this destruction, imagine loss? How might fragment intone that which is subordinated or obscured in and through the administration and degradation of body that is now the rule of the West? Without giving way to a kind of infinite mourning, how might lyric suggest form for the loss—or collapse—that is so constitutive of body and of ecosystem today? Such questions as these underpin this work.

Bio:
Angela Hume lives and writes in Oakland, California.