Poetry Chaplet

Belladonna* Collaborative, April 2024

Paperback, 13 pages

#329

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Bark, Archive, Splinter is an ecopoetic experiment. Inspired, in part, by the commonplace book, by medieval texts, these fragments aim to bring together intimacies of wood, race, desire, via a sylvestral grammar and syntax, via a poetics of grafting.

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REVIEWS

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'Can something be both dense and springy? That’s a question I ask myself as I read Jay Gao’s work. Of course, that’s cork, the bark of an oak tree. In the language in this chaplet, Bark Archive Splinter, we are asked to contend with material—bark is a substance, yes, but also a sound, a rich utterance, and material is what we unpack from the smart earth. We unearth the hidden metrical work, an obsession with sonics, that floods Jay’s work [...] His work is lush with symbols, with peeling back layers of a word, enriching the reader in sensations of discovery and awe at the nimbleness of language to spring forward [...] His work is a response, a call, an echo, a translation, a question.'

Emily Bark Brown, host of the Belladonna* GIST reading series