Lederer, Katy: Engineers

Saturnalia Books, paperbackPublication Date: October 15, 2023Publisher Marketing: In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is " the self" ? What is " the other" ? And how to reproduce " one' s self" ? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body-- or poem-- malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body-- or poem-- attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral " we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate