Here's how DABA describes the new collection:
A Very Large Array is an extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work. Spanning more than thirty years, it gathers poems from her published books, as well as from journals and chapbooks long out of print. Osman's writing is relentlessly inventive, devising countless new formats that combine elements of the poem and the experimental essay. From her deep excavations of documentary materials, including maps from nineteenth-century New York and psy-ops leaflets dropped on Afghanistan after 9/11, her poems trace overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history. For Osman, vision and language are closely linked: both are anatomical, cognitive, and cultural processes — processes that are enlisted, as she repeatedly demonstrates, to exploit and entrench power. When she feeds streams of "official" language — from Supreme Court opinions to the procedural chatter of Predator drone pilots — through the filter of her poetic investigations, the verbal churn that issues forth is as chilling as it is comic.
One might consider our Osman author page as an aural accompaniment to A Very Large Array, with an encyclopedic assortment of readings, panel discussions, interviews, podcasts, talks, and more from 1990 to the present with over 100 individual files. Click here to start browsing.
