The Casual Presence of Borders

Borders exist in and are occupied by space and time ritualized by seen and unseen, known and unknown, human struggles. Mackie Blanton's The Casual Presence of Borders captures borders present around denizens or friends gathered at bars or over coffee, over new births, over silence and meals; at nearby places of worship or warfare or death; or unvisited planets or islands of our knowledge or imagination; or the sensed presence of the cells and arteries of the human body; and human beings noticed in easy chairs, in backyards across fences, or caught crossing in woods, swamps, bridges. Blanton is driven by two concepts: the protection of fiction inhabiting poems and a guiding principle of a post-contemporary sensibility that slips through and away from modernism and postmodernism to grasp elsewhere a possible unfamiliar, hardly-quite-there-yet, future.