Displays (Pilot Press, October 2023)

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Displays has theoretical commitments, even if only to a “birdlike, brained” logic. Katherine Franco’s debut collection attends to sibilants, the system of signs, and sainthood in a kind of half-joke. Displays features a subject who wants to be “good” and for desire to be delivered through a well-formed critique. She likes explication. Then, she doesn’t.

 

Deriving its terrain from the classroom and the open road, Displays demonstrates how poetics is a source of knowledge and flight. The collection is dogged for a thesis, but instead finds itself amidst practicums, biopolytechnicaltechniques, and acts of renunciation. “Likeness is like / flying,” Franco writes in one of the book's final poems. Flight need not mean an abandonment of politics, pain, or one’s daily life – the collection suggests – but instead the generation of a landscape where play and poetic experimentation reign. There, we can discover the restless epistemology distinct to Displays.

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Press:

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"There certainly is no synonym for the recurrent 'striations' Franco has created in her Displays—digging deep into the surfaces she's built up, a surface rhythm appears in her work like bars of music. For reasons I can't quite explain, I hear a sacred exuberance reminiscent of Adélia Prado or even Theodore Roethke's charge: I'll make a broken music, or I'll die." – Aaron Fagan

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"An Interview with Katherine Franco" (Maya Sibul), The Oxonian Review, 30 October 2023

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