Civil Noir

"The poems collected here, in Melanie Neilson's Civil Noir, are not idees fixes but incitements, instigations. Developing out of remarkable particularities and juxtapositions, each of which may serve as a rapid and beautiful preparation for thinking about the virtue of vitality-they engender it too. But the book is not about momentum. It is about the expansion of any moment of perception into all of its parts, and it is to this purpose that the works are so carefully shaped on the page."- Lyn Hejinian