Time, & Its Monument

Human folly is to believe our ziggurat is real, a really long time. But as the founder of modern geology Sir George Lyell declared only as recently as 1830, “ Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’ s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them.” Watching the days go by, we write, we build, we grasp, we render frangible towers in the sky. Matthew Cooperman’ s  Time, & Its Monument  captures this eroded sequence by tracking signs of human impermanence: solve et coagula, the inevitable falling away and coming together of all matter, how and what we watch, and who, and the collaborative acts of empathy by which humans might, if not extend, meaningfully ornament the Anthropocene. These are prose poems, cut ups, necessary collages. They vary in such matters as Wittgenstein, the panopticon, and the Gulf Wars to the poetics of drought emerging through erasure with Ed Dorn’ s The Shoshoneans,  his famous study of the Great Basin. Cooperman’ s Time, & Its Monument  frames the artifacts of the human set: “ in the long    run recurrence / the stacking of shells / days certain seasons / the steeple accrues.”