Smock

The book begins with an epigraph from Lucy Irigaray: ‘Of what [is] this is? Of air’ and refers to her critical engagement with Heidegger’s forgetting of this invisible substance that is all around us. The book presents a found photographic image of a girl in the process of jumping who is apparently caught hovering in mid-air inches away from the ground and the words continue to ‘unsuppose solidity as ground’. The smock of the title might refer to a dress but also to the fabricated smock of a windmill. In this book the windmill is smockless, its sails are broken - a ruined structure that nevertheless, like the words of the poem, seeks to articulate the air around it and ‘avoid [the] tether’ of ‘timed strictures’.