Surveille

“It was breeding season, / wasn’t it, and they were running from something,” writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into—and ultimately protect from—this hostile world.Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. She writes, “Still, I watch / the watcher watch me watch / the man standing in front of me / peering through the crosshatch / iron mesh, waiting for bodies / beloved he knows he cannot touch / to arrive on the other side.”Surveille is a book about people under various forms of control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), about mothering, and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.Hold the husk.Suck each bead out. Thereare degrees of loss, speedsat which pain travelsthrough the body. See,even the rose neck’s bent. I do notneed to tell you I’m sick. I want tobe remembered for the absencemy body made in space.—Excerpt from “Gardening, the mother gives her daughter a lesson on loss”