Zodiac sign Sagittarius

Veronica Forrest-Thomson undertakes nothing less than a revision of the English poetic tradition from one John to another: from Donne and the Metaphysical Poets to Ashbery and the New York School. Through recontextualized quotes, parodies and pastiches, collage texts, concrete poetry, mistranslations, and other text-distorting techniques, Forrest-Thomson's poems engage in dialogue with canonized (mostly male) authors, whose works are questioned in the light of their respective conventions or treated with mockery and clever irony. These texts represent the culmination and overcoming of a poetry crisis, striving to assert oneself in an art shaped by gray-haired masters: Like in a mirror experience, Forrest-Thomson names herself in her poems, comments on their creation, and simultaneously exposes identity as a Trojan horse. She becomes Clytemnestra, Helena, Agamemnon, Electra, Dante, Beatrice, T. S. Eliot, Cordelia, and many others. The projection surface "I" is neither one nor all at the same time: "I" is both self and non-self, a pronoun as little as the predicate assigned to it. The primary goal of her poems, one might say with Forrest-Thomson herself, is to uncover the tricks of our languages.