Author Description

Natural landscapes loom as sites of collective memory in Ed Steck's Mountain Forge Serviceberry Systems. They are photo albums, sculptural frames, lines, fractures, declivities, and ascents that humans and non-humans share and to which they bear witness. As repositories of transtemporal experience, Steck's landscape-poem works through contact and ripple effect, a chain-link of circles and divergent lines, a ragged bulge of phonetic and conceptual footholds. In this lyric place, one partakes of an unraveling landscape - a space of formations grasped as a transformative path. Hurricanes act on geology. Mountains erode. Lines appear, crumble, and re-form. Steck's poem charts the chipping away of plane and angle to show that names alone withstand cyclonic force.