On Certainty

The Tyrant, the Philosopher, and an unnamed narrator (the figure of a poet), anchor On Certainty, a technological dystopia and feminist neo-epic that deconstructs pictorial, agricultural, and virtual realities. On Certainty raises post-humanist questions: What value does Descartes’s cogito have in a world with “miniature drones performing the bee function for flowers”? Of what use are aesthetics when “[t]he archive of Western art [is] pillaged for virtual reality skins”? And what of epistemology, when the bodies that produce knowledge are “augmented” by VR? Kelsey asks “[w]hat might be taken as fact worthy of conversion into sense,” revealing the stakes: when disbelieved, reality ceases to be matter, and to matter.

Weaving speculative fiction, aphorism, and lyric fragment with documentary asides about toxic pollutants, On Certainty posits cross-genre hybridity as a mode of survival: “The Tyrant had said, great love exists in selecting one thing over all / others.” Kelsey exposes both this cruel irony (“A choice of one object over another as humans, animals, forests, fields, / lakes, seas everywhere are dying”), and the false binary of nature versus artifice: “How do I order this vocabulary raked and pruned, revealing a fern-like / growth”; “I write reality and artifice softly furl into one another, softly mulch.”

The speaker’s metamorphoses (“after the first / night with the Tyrant I woke to my body furred as a leopard”) are haunted by Jeff Koons’s Phryne (a metallic ballerina) and the sculpture-cum-fetish object of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos, whose self-concealing pose proves the female “‘sense of embodiment’” to be “the primary vehicle of / certainty.” After the Philosopher dies, and the narrator attempts to assassinate the Tyrant, he is reborn as illusion, freeing her from this manufactured Eden: liberation from male-dominated images and representations establish the narrator as victor.

On Certainty investigates gendered discourses of the senses and of knowledge with brilliant savoir faire: “Step close to any figure, small or large, and its material will fragment / flickering and light.”