Elegy [Model Interaction Trend]
Elegy [Model Interaction Trend] is the corscuating, inimitable debut poetry pamphlet from Charlie McIlwain. An astonishing palimpset of quotes, samples and deconstructed syntax, this is a poetic sequence which holds (radical, queer) ethical witness to modern brutality.
“Charlie McIlwain’s Elegy is a thought-provoking reflection on memory, loss, and (absent) confession. Repeated breaks in sense and syntax mirror the inability of memory to capture charged events with clarity. McIlwain looks back on that which evades representation and offers us his reflections “in chalk”. To speak in chalk also implies the production of word and sound particles that remain on the sleeves, in the air, taken into the lungs. After reading McIlwain’s Elegy, you will carry some of its lingering chalk dust away with you.”
– William Keohane
“Charlie McIlwain is a contemporary shaman battling forces of light and dark on an extended KWEHR-tee keyboard, a poet’s poet, a cowboy with a Mac here to give the mind, body and soul what they long for, an artist who doesn’t come around often and isn’t born easily. Their work requests a subjective reading experience, in the way one might expect to read an abstract painting, feel a Miles Davis performance or discern images within the flames of a fire — the reader has to do some of the lifting to gather the wood here, but becomes all the warmer for their participation. E[MIT] is a happening, an event in aid of itself, where understanding isn’t as important as experiencing. McIlwain’s world is vital, various, a delicately plural symphony of signs, ritualistically bodying forth a tear in our expectation of language and poetic utterance while giving rise to how these are witnessed, here and now, collaborating anew.
– Jake Hawkey
Charlie McIlwain
Charlie McIlwain was born in 1999. There is no danger.