As they march, they observe the natural world around them. The stone capsules and cliffs of mica are proliferating and changing. Their smooth surfaces bloom with nubby biometric shrubs. As they march with the migrating swarm, new shapes rise up and force them apart. He signals for her not to touch them, as they are collectors and recorders of accidental contact. Some of the shrubs are covered in beautiful flowers that click with shutters and shots. Someone just ahead of her brushes against a smooth side of mica and it slices a specimen of skin like glass. A stone formation releases radio waves over each body that passes, reflecting its energy back as a three dimensional image in the cloudless sky. The environment reads, tests, and measures.
Motion Studies
Jena Osman
May 2019
A tour de force of documentary, speculative fiction, film criticism, and lyric jump cuts…
Douglas Kearney
Motion Studies consists of three essay-poems that begin as meditations on 19th century science and end firmly as research into the present. From chronophotography to algorithmic surveillance, from phrenology to fMRI brain scans, from Victorian specimen collections to the bleached bones of the Great Barrier Reef, each poem in this collection explores technologies of knowing each other and the world we’re in.
Motion Studies was awarded the 2020 Firecracker Award for Poetry from CLMP.
About the Author
Jena Osman’s books of poems include Corporate Relations (Burning Deck), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press), The Network (Fence Books, National Poetry Series selection), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). Osman was a 2006 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. She co-founded and co-edited the literary magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr from 1994-2005.
Praise
In Jena Osman’s brilliant Motion Studies, you’ll find incisive focus—not despite—but because of alarm. A tour de force of documentary, speculative fiction, film criticism, and lyric jump cuts, Motion Studies plies surveillance, pseudoscience, and the commodification of the living into three long works that drive further Osman’s vital decade-spanning investigation of power, human displacement, and erasure. Like dead coral and wreckage sedimented on a seabed, a violent record is legible in this layering; Osman reminds us of this. Plus, she recasts a bird as the lead in Spielberg’s Minority Report. That’s got to move you.
Douglas Kearney
What energizes this work and makes it so compelling to move through is how much it allows the reader’s body and mind to be activated and integrated while reading. Jena Osman’s Motion Studies measures, dissects, and dissects the dissector whenever it wants. It marvels, it studies, it makes a weaving of science, poetry, and testimony. It is a study of instruments and torture, of the unraveling of a question; it is a defense of the heart’s electromagnetic intelligence, and, in its most secret moments, it is a novel of days. Brilliantly conceived and rendered.
Renee Gladman
Jena Osman’s breadth of knowledge is extraordinary and almost unbearably specific, as she plunges into the mechanics of technology from Victorian smoke machines to present-day nano-drones. With keen dispassionate patience, Osman traces the genealogy of data-mining, and while doing so, she slows us down and rehabilitates our attention span, leading us deep into her surfeit findings. Motion Studies is a book of endurance rewarded with absolute revelation.
Cathy Park Hong
Motion Studies entertains and essays with a bittersweet heart, continuing Osman's project of revealing hidden networks that we ignore at the price of confusion, even ignorance. Accompanied by a series of lively guiding voices, Motion Studies locates and dislocates us in worlds awash in information waiting to be read — historical, bodily, ecological, psychological, political, even fantastical worlds woven together through man's errors and obsessions. Even reading itself becomes a thread Osman tugs across her loom of language; I am happily caught as I am awakened and undone.
Thalia Field
No one in recent years has made more of poetry as a platform for inquiry, for essayistic investigation, than Jena Osman. Her subject—in Corporate Relations (which explores the precedents for and ramifications of corporations’ personhood in Citizens United) and Public Figures (much of which is ‘seen’ from the eyes of public statuary in Philadelphia)—has been the monstrous animation of the institutions we create. Here, in… Motion Studies, a reverse dynamic is under scrutiny: the stopless conversion of internal life (pulse, breath, heat, neural activity) to external data legible to processors. Osman’s brand of researched essaying and imaginative exploration comes to mind when I think of what Wallace Stevens said about how the artist ‘may be’ in relationship to her subject: ‘its inhabitant and elect expositor.'
Brian Blanchfield
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-23-7
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 144 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: May 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: Dossier