Abstract
Method Acting is a collection of poems that positions grief as a springboard for reflective exercises in lexical theatrics, linguistic historiography, cinematic allusion, and daily personality. Although the illness and death of the speaker’s mother are central, these poems do not constitute a trauma narrative, nor do they engage the question of what it means to lose a loved one. They record the severance, especially in the first section and the first half of the second section, but they are equally attuned to the speaker’s quiddities and, by virtue of this attunement, make space to consider generativity’s reach—how far might an apple fall from a tree just felled?—and the linguistics and energetics of belonging. In Method Acting, no single poetic form takes precedence; what unites the poems, which are alternately radial and inward, rangy and neurotic, is a philologist's investment in the histories, debts, and limits of language. Ultimately, this collection dares to re-conceptualize grandiloquence as both method of acting and raison d'être.