Made Local with S. Brook Corfman

Named the best poetry of 2020 by The New York Times, S. Brook Corfman’s My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice. Worried that a poem invested in the particulars of Corfman’s life would be uninteresting—that the “ordinary” would be mundane, they instead found memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning. In these poems, a combination of dread and anxiety undoes a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as Corfman writes to find out how their own gender fits into the world. In My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites the prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice (“journaling”) meets the associative power of the poem.

S. Brook Corfman is the author of Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen for the 2018 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and two chapbooks, including The Anima: Four Closet Dramas. Born and raised in Chicago, they now live in Pittsburgh.