Open “Girls’ Day Out” by Kerry Lawrynovicz
The two poems in this work were inspired by a personal experience of horseback riding in a place where and six unsolved murder cases: Calder Road. The first “Poem” consists of an prose poem describing a ride through the trail, followed by several short stanzas extracted from words in the original— an effect reminiscent of Tom Phillips artist book A Humument. The second, “Shards,” has four movements composed and recombined from phrases published in the Houston Chronicle about the murder cases.
The restraint of its animations— slow paced fades, recombinations, and morphs from one movement to another—the seriousness of the subject matter, and the stunned meditative tone of a speaker who was not only in the same area of the murders, at roughly the same time, but also fit the profile of the victims, make this a powerful poetic experience.
Featured in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.
