The Long White Cloud of Unknowing

Poetry. Women’s Studies. A woman with a suitcase of meat waits in a room for one day and into the night. Inside the room, language surrounds her. What is the stone phone, what images anchor her sentence? As heresy and authority intensify, she readies to open the door. How can we come to know–to truly experience–place, presence, and time’s own embodiment in us: what earlier writers have called ‘the divine?’ In the quiet power of Lisa Samuels’s vocalized listening across languages and via bodies, we too are a listening body, a body in absorption and expulsion, attentive in the thinking, pause, and query of a day in a woman’s life. Spanish French M?ori Latin all course thru the mind of the one thinking in English, whose rich linguistic inner life we inhabit and move in as if it were a spacesuit we don to float in atmospheres otherwise inaccessible to us. In this language, this unknowing cloud full of knowledges, relations, worldly resonances, we are held. THE LONG WHITE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING captivates utterly.–Erin Moure