Pulleys & Locomotion

Poetry. Rachel Galvin's debut collection PULLEYS & LOCOMOTION is a hub for movement, immigration, and flight. Alternating between lyrical extension and succinct prose poems, this book brings together science, philosophy, folktale, and half-remembered history. Raised in Rochester, NY, the home of Eastman Kodak, Galvin has an imagination shaped by the technologies and metaphors of photographic and filmic vision. Like a zoetrope, the spinning cylinder that led to early motion picture, the pages of PULLEYS & LOCOMOTION form a device that creates irresistible motion out of a succession of poems. "Rely on your eye for illusion of motion," Galvin writes in "How to Build Your Own Zoetrope." "Figures move naturally at fourteen frames / per second and if you have pictured me, / at this rate I will always run toward you, / years hence, luminous, blurred / with expectation." In conversation with figures as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Edmond Jabès, Roland Barthes, and André Kertesz, these poems teem with vitality. Their sense of the contemporaneous is inextricable from history and dream: "News footage simulates the last century: / a woman running shoeless in snow, / her inaudible voice." Audacious and musical, in a style that responds to French and Latin American poetic traditions, these poems will echo in the reader's ear. "Go, she says, Pour your palmful of water / from one hand to the other."