The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts: The title refers to the promotional descriptor in the late 1970s and early 1980s of modular toys based on the popular Japanese toy line by Takara. Projectile hazard, choking hazard, good times.
Psychotic Mood Swing: Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost souls, lost causes, and lost objects.
Viridescent: All the plants cited here are (or were) to be found in Florida.
Destiny and Mystique: The issue in question is Uncanny X-Men #142, published February 1981.
Vertumnal: The title and poem refer not only to the Roman god but also to the painting by the Mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Space: This is a reconstruction of Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective drawing techniques, and owes a debt to the analysis of those events by Arthur Zajonc in his Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, published 1995.
I will show you . . . : Castrovalva is a lithograph by M. C. Escher, and the quote is from a Dutch critic cited by Bruno Ernst in The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. “Castrovalva” is also the title of a 1982 episode of Doctor Who.
Castle-Valve and Castrovalva both draw on the epigraph to Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany.
Fortifications of the Land of Grasses and Flowers is a response to “Dawn” by Federico García Lorca, translated by Eliot Weinberger.
Pilgrims refers to an especially dispiriting episode from Matsuo Bashō’s pilgrimages.
Mine: Phosphate mining is one of Florida’s many egregious ecological errors. Every now and again one of these mines will collapse into a sinkhole and corrupt the aquifer. The area in which this is likely to occur is called Bone Valley, and the industry was precipitated by the arrival of the Florida Southern Railway in Arcadia, Florida, in 1886.
Tertullian: The text I am interrupting here is drawn from the Apologeticum and De Testimonio animae.
There is but one . . . : the title refers to a line from Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus.
Five Million Years to Earth, produced in 1967 by Hammer Film Productions, was written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Roy Ward Baker.
Here Comes the Flood refers to the eponymous painting by Rob Gonsalves.
The Uncertain Value of Human Life: In cave diving, different levels of salinity can create the optical illusion that the more translucent top layer is, in fact, not liquid at all but air. Divers sometimes get confused and will remove their breathing equipment when still entirely under water.
Generation Mechanism: “Harbor wave” is the literal translation of the word “tsunami.” I am especially indebted to Facing the Wave by Gretel Ehrlich, published 2013.
The Stoning of the Devil: The number of deaths for some of these incidents remains a matter of dispute between state officials and other organizations.
Tableau vivant can refer equally to living figures posed and photographed to resemble paintings and to paintings made by reliance on posed figures.
Spirit Measure: In John 20:17, Jesus is alleged to have responded to being recognized by Mary Magdalene by saying “touch me not” or, in Latin, noli mi tangere.
Zato-no-Ichi: The actor Shintaro Katsu starred in twenty-six Zatoichi feature films. New Tale of Zatoichi was the third of these, directed by Tozuko Tanaka in 1963.
“Is There in Truth No Beauty?”: This is a 1968 episode of Star Trek, written by Jean Lisette Aroeste and directed by Ralph Senensky and featuring Diana Muldaur as Dr. Miranda.
The Concealed: The only Salome mentioned in the Bible is a disciple of Jesus; the better-known figure is described but never named. Many details we associate with her narrative are derived from subsequent commentaries and elaborations, such as the dance of the seven veils, which appears in the Strauss opera, but he got it from Wilde, and he got it from Flaubert. It’s also worth noting that when Josephus mentions Salome, he says nothing about John the Baptist at all.
& Juliet: The substance referred to is Vantablack, and currently, the only artist licensed to use it is Anish Kapoor.
The tale of Hoichi the Earless is one of four narratives anthologized in Kwaidan, Masaki Kobayashi’s 1965 horror film based on Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of Japanese myths and folktales.
Claire Lenoir: Villiers de L’Isle-Adam is one of the great also-rans of speculative literature, a hot mess of romantic, symbolist, and Catholic impulses and practices. The assumption upon which Claire Lenoir depends, however, was not his invention, but was in wide circulation at the time. I am indebted to Simon Ings’s description in A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision, published 2008.
The Social Realism of Negative Space draws upon 1 Corinthians.
Mise en abyme: Though the technique is now more often associated with painting and film (as well as in recursive stories or frame stories), its origin is in heraldry.
Let me tell you why . . . : Severe myopia turns every light source into a sphere that approximates the action of the eye itself, so that when you look at, say, the moon, you can see the shadows of your own eyelids around its perimeter.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment to the readers and editors of the following journals for publishing these poems.
Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day: “Hothouse”
American Poetry Review: “The Concealed”
Bennington Review: “Decimation” and “Wait Until Dark”
Black Warrior Review: “Look Up”
DIAGRAM: “& Juliet”
Ecotone: “Descender” and “Viridescent”
Michigan Quarterly Review: “Claire Lenoir” and “Pilgrims”
POETRY: “The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts”
Typo Magazine: “Fontanel”
Thanks to Erika Stevens and the wonderful people of Coffee House Press.
Thanks to Hilary Lowe and Michael Gustafson and the staff of Literati
Bookstore in Ann Arbor. Thank you Linda Gregerson, Maureen McLane,
Paula Mendoza, Sarah Messer, Paisley Rekdal, and Keith Taylor.
This book is for my parents, with gratitude and love.
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Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire, and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection.
The Cataracts was typeset by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services. Text is set in Warnock Pro.
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