Of Which Anything Consists

Expertly weaving various textual matter into beautiful, nuanced, and finely balanced form/content patterns, Barbara Maloutas’s OF WHICH ANYTHING CONSISTS is a serial exercise in radical apposition that finally puts a new spin on an old teleological argument: thus; all things being equal; all things are equal; after all. –Harold Abramowitz In OF WHICH ANYTHING CONSISTS Barbara Maloutas explores consciousness responding to the four elements of our material world. Here is the record of consciousness feeling and thinking of itself in response to what is most elemental. Employing a broken idiom, haltingly clear, Maloutas’s language approaches the boundaries of the world with a strange and wonderful grace. We should not be surprised, however, because in Maloutas’s poetry, language and the liminal world are drawn to each other as strangers who find in the presence of the other a strange and pure joy. –Jon Thompson Barbara Maloutas’s remarkable OF WHICH ANYTHING CONSISTS is a marvelous testament to the four sources of the earth’s traditional elements–water, fire, earth and air–in which the poet miraculously balances associations, both naturally symbolically and linguistically dissociative, to create new relationships between the forces of our lives. Ultimately, Maloutas’s impassioned associations cry out for our culture’s lack of understanding of the relationships between the essential elements of our living world, yet her work poetically embraces our potential relationship with all of the elements which define our lives: pure air enters the lungs…before nailing down windows for winter…. Maloutas’s work is an astonishingly poetic achievement. –Douglas Messerli