Incidents of Scattering

Let’s begin with the simplest facts: “Dust & your body”—how the body must also revert to that from which it came. Such is the cosmic equation at the very heart of Karen Lepri’s wonderful debut, Incidents of Scattering. Lepri takes the self as “fig. I,” subjectivity’s iota that necessitates the existence of a world and others in it. As in myth, the erotic reveals itself as a cosmogonic principle, and the work of the poem is nothing less than to discover the laws of this world. In returning to Victorian science, Lepri attends to an ever-diminishing point in which a fact returns to the ether and makes itself available for something stranger than description: that cycle of poetic vitality in which our effort to categorize transforms into wonder’s staggering forms of attention. I might call Lepri’s discovery “empirical intimacy.”