Winner of the 2018 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition, Selected by CA Conrad.
“Dear Anne Lesley Selcer, hello from, “This book looks like reversal. / This book has a beauty that’s ruined when it’s read.” The misery of dying each day, and each day better seeing through the hallucination of our imagined banquet, your poems do not comfort, better then that they galvanize and embolden. The acceptance of and anger for what we think we know. Thank you. My life differs from before your book because of your book. “I arise from this accelerated archeology to spit in knowing’s eye.” In the stack of poetry books I keep with me, the ones that I need to remind me to make the conditions of this world tolerable in order to fully transfigure, your book is at the top. It is poets like you who make not being able to do it all alone okay.” - CA Conrad
Written from inside its own formal conundrum, Sun Cycle deals with representation, value, power, gender and the aesthetic. Influenced by 80’s film theory updated for 24-hour access screen time, it is obsessed with images and is named for the star that makes vision possible. These poems shift deftly from treatise to entreaty, casting form and finance as corollary particulates in the air surrounding art-making. Selcer’s work creates a complicated critique of appearance and visuality, claiming: “You are carefully surviving what needs to be destroyed. I need you to language otherwise.”Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Their writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.
