In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is " the self" ? What is " the other" ? And how to reproduce " one' s self" ? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body- or poem- malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body- or poem- attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral " we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate and ultimately refashion our pre-conceived notions of the self- and of life. Radical, uncanny, and stunningly original, The Engineers takes us on a journey to a place we' ve never been, but that is hauntingly familiar.
