deadfalls & snares

Poetry. Under current conditions of militarization and state sponsored torture, DEADFALLS & SNARES stands among our moment's bravest and most necessary works of poetry. Beyond comfortable notions of complicity and witness, Samantha Giles's writing transforms our desire to see into an ability to parselike a sentient grammarianthe relations between subject and object, torturer and tortured, as they fuse with our interiors. In other words, 'it's us in / what already happened / in the way that it shifts / in its visibility / it's us.' Reading these poems while guided by conventions of collective spectatorship, we catch ourselves perversely trying to refamiliarize what Giles has so successfully defamiliarized, and in doing so, the double bind of our ethical conundrum becomes acutely perceptible. Rob Halpern