Deborah Meadows’ Depleted Burden Down, begins its work in the space where your critical-poetic home used to be. In the midst of the rubble, which is also and nevertheless an ambiguously inflected “clearing” (with its estranged “beautiful” scraps of once-familiar meaning), Meadows asks who-in-relation writes or speaks of where we have gotten to, and in what language of. “This folding knife, this toad-stabber and father-killer was distributed to all veterans of World War II in bivouacs and colleges…forced to thought.” At the head in our hearts, the question whither the secular democratic critical project, our texts that aspire from its raging fires and somber halls. To start: lift off, burden down, scavenge parts for new lodgings in this gritty, smart book.

– Laura Elrick

If it were possible to speak of speech as a shimmering “landscape” (an endless shifting of refraction angles, “Indra’s veil”), slipping away from the perspective of “seeing/knowing,” then the poetry of Deborah Meadows seems to me a thorough and perilous investigation of a border region between experience and description—“<…> How we can see // a creature and not know // what it is <…>” —that is, at the floating point that is always “beside the point,” has no “space” and yet is an all-convex system of knowledge in ignorance (“but if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge…” — Cratylus). The poem “After Hölderlin” (from her collection, Goodbye Tissues) says this directly as though vision yet again stumbled on a bothersome footnote to a welltrodden route. That which poetry can be, to Deborah Meadows, takes place precisely in this aporia. And not so much “takes place” as takes place in transition. There are no dharmas: they are mere reflections of one another.

– Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (tr. E. Pavloff)

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