I like to understand how things fit together, and John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds is a book of bringing things together. Peters thinks about infrastructure and world making through his perspective that “environments are media.” Here are some selections from the index: atmosphere; bells; broadcasting; clocks; container technologies; etcetera, as feature of reality; feet; geometry; Internet, and dolphins; knowledge, too much to know; lists; news; patriarchy; plants, mediators of the sun; radio; sea, compared to writing; sky media; shipwreck; time, and fire; weather. I’d recommend reading this book at the same time as Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. It examines “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather” to do its “wake work” in persisting anti-Black infrastructures and world making. Then you might read Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, then Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, then the books of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns, then…
— Dale Tracy is the author of the full-length poetry collection Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022); several chapbooks, including Gnomics (above/ground press, 2024) and Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery, 2023); and the monograph With the Witnesses (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). She is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
You can read Dale Tracy’s poetry in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
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