With their extravagant musicality, Triplett’s poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled “supply chain” that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world. Equal parts celebration and lament for the mechanisms we shape and are shaped by, these poetic acts reveal the poet as an entangled mediator among registers of public and private, intimate and historical, voicings. Here we traffic in the blessings and burdens of the human will to shape a world. What’s more, as we follow these linked enchainings of the deeply en-worlded citizen, we reawaken to the central paradox of our time, the need to refuse easy answers, to stay open, trilling, between these necessary notes of critique and of compassion.
“Pimone Triplett’s Supply Chain traces the imperatives of indentiture—‘supply,’ here, serving as both modifier and verb of command—from global market forces to the psychological farce of self-regulation. Few writers investigate the anthemic inversions of our collective syntax with such ferocity and nuance. ‘My grammar,’ sings this poet, hand over her reader’s heart, ‘tis of thee.’”— Srikanth Reddy, author, Voyager
“Of the poets I admire, I can think of no other who dwells as comfortably inside language as Pimone Triplett. As such, Supply Chain—like her previous volumes—finds her gloriously moving between fixed and subtle shifts of meanings, between what’s known and what can only be discovered through such jubilant lyricism. And yet, her poems are not empty concerts; they are too thematically urgent and charmingly mature in their haunting range of concerns. From the nature of human capital in our modern age to the cultural inheritance of a son, here is a poet who unapologetically showcases the virtues of a complex, demanding art to possess that which haunts the periphery of our imaginations while she simply has fun with words.”—Major Jackson
“To All the Houseplants I Have Killed”
Paper-chapped, heavy fall frost not
banked on. Swerved out the rockery, a brittle
residuum. Hebe, e pluribus unum, liking
brights and light shade, moderate water,
no wet feet. I bring the thing in only
to watch it fail, some second impulse
scraping the land, nakedest, to stress.
Open, you lavender-blue cluster, what’s left
of your busy luck. What eco of echoes that
hollows this hearing is: arrest me, item,
or keep your place. Also, the mind, long
enough overlooked, seems less than to leave
your copper burnt curls snagged past the saying.
Mister, bloom where you are: off the box.
