Things That Are

When I first tried to encapsulate Amy Leach's writing I came up with the description: “picture a 12 year-old Annie Dillard over-dubbing a David Attenborough documentary after guzzling 40 oz. of Mountain Dew.” But then I realized that's pretty degrading and doesn't come close to capturing the depth of her poetry. What I was trying to get across, which I think most readers will notice first about her writing, is the gravitational force of her energy. There is so much vitality in her writing! How the hell does she confine it all in her singular being?!

In pondering Amy's existence I'm reminded of this Susan Sontag quote:

“If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn't have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what's “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we're stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. An imperfect design! An imperfect being!” —As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Amy's imaginative use of language alone makes Things That Are a worthwhile read, but underlying such luminous adornments is a deep poetic sussing of the nature of existence. In rococo flair—decked out in crushed velvet tutus and opalescent piping on holographic bodices—her metaphors twirl, dip, and dander around the essence of light, the process of manifesting consciousness, self-actualization, and the human yearning to be to be truly manmade, machines.

“Your blessing is your curse and your curse is your blessing. Because you see details, you cannot see hints of light; because you see hints of light, you cannot see details. You would need diverse eyes if you wished to be equally penetrating and sensitive. You would need to have eyes like the box jellyfish, with its sixteen light-sensitive eyes and eight acute camera-like eyes—all twenty-four eyes hanging down on stalks. However, you would also need a brain. But maybe that is not possible; maybe, in fact, the brainlessness of the box jellyfish is a direct consequence of its tremendous powers of sight. Perhaps neither the animal nor the prophet has been invented who could process so thorough a vision. It is disquieting enough to be hyper-acute or hypersensitive; perhaps being both would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world.”

WHOA! So many “whoas” while reading Things That Are. And how is it that Amy has time to write? How is she not the sole guest of a radio broadcast where people call in from 6AM to 6PM to ask her what she thinks about cellular mitosis, aspartame, and the former Soviet Republic? To then host a banquet on the mating habits of Neolithic ideas? Followed by amending 40 new words to her fledgling language, Z1pE? I suppose it's because she's selfish. So we're left to wonder...

“Stars are my bonfires, blue is my diaphanous land”