Description
Book SynopsisLyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia. In the poems of
On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.
Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique,
On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.
Trade Review“In
On Certainty the Tyrant, the Philosopher and the Poet are triangulated in a struggle for meaning’s definitions within history’s conglomerations and the troubling immediacy of socio-political and ecological disaster. In shimmering fractionalized form Kelsey summons past lives and a projection of possible futures into an event horizon of feminist reckoning. This fierce and elegant saga untangles speculative tautologies to understand dynamic contingency in prismatic, mesmerizing transmissions. I wish the Poet the upper hand in regardening the world.” -- Brenda Iijima
“
On Certainty is a feminist, philosophical meditation on love, loss, and ways of knowing—through history, through philosophy, technology, and through the body. Like the taxidermied deer sculpture covered with crystal spheres that the book makes reference to,
On Certainty considers the blurring of the real and the virtual, the conceptual and the embodied. There are no simplistic borders, no clear edges. There is instead beauty and lyricism in language, the accumulative power of repetition and re-contextualizing of phrases and imagery, and there are provocations, thrilling in all their ontological possibilities.” -- Mary-Kim Arnold
