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Show ARTS miscellaneous plastic lids By Conner Basset A cluster of them, not random but rather shaped like the states. A shipping container brimming with goods manufactured in China. Glossy gizmos, plastic bins, electronics of every make. This is a most quiet seduction: The thrill of lights, or the tip of touch screens. This is the ash, I thought, the crust crumbs, the eggshell, the ice shavings: Or maybe the chokehold, or knot of a heart. A project of slides: Rubber soldiers. Rocket ships. Toshiba televisions. A downpour of jackhammer-looking squirt guns. The children eat everything. They bark and bounce with piggish clamor. They romp in the plastic dark: They toast: A celebration to whatever has come and gone of our common country. In a society where technological engrossment has reached its height, private attention and introspection seem to be in decline. Similarly, the use of computers, the internet, cell phones, text messaging, email, video games and television have changed the way we think, interpret information and interact with the past. The project of my poetry is an aesthetic reaction to modern advances in technology and science, acting as a kind of disjunctive navigation through contemporary time and space. The focus of my poetry is to create a primal, emotional import through disjunction, distortion and defamiliarization of popular culture, values and ideologies. My poems employ fragmentation and immediate ruptures of speech and spatial imagery in order to examine the erasure of geographic, cultural and historical borders. Ultimately, the project of this collection of poems is not to condemn outrightly the changing world or our actions within it, but rather to explore its consequences with wonder and mystery 12 I THE V MAGAZINE |