Brand names and their attendant ®s might be sprinkled throughout The Green Ray, yet, except for these registered trademarks, this exquisitely dissociative book seems free of any utterance previously registered in English. Copp’s liminal language—unmoored from identifiable references, its syntax and articulations torqued to the point of estrangement—asserts, above all, her material’s plasticity and unfixity. Its effect is such that straight talk rings deadeningly ordinary. May promo be a case in point. The Green Ray is gloriously unblurbable.

What is this postindustrial flume of a poetic line, radiant with French-film gift-packs, recidivist vocabulary, heart on spin art? I don't know, but everybody will be imitating it next year, and I'm in love with the whole damn hadron accelerator.

Corina Copp is a phenomenologist of love's catastrophic syntax.

Corina Copp’s The Green Ray defies description, but here goes: Copp uses highly entertaining neologisms, homonyms, and tricky rhymes, within a seriously hacked prosody of incompletion, to build a lived linguistic world. Where “vernal spackle” lightly daubs a fragile mise-en-scène, a countdown to crescendo/collapse is underway. Her characters’ talk and writers’ pronouncements create a chatter that would not be uninteresting to the NSA. But if this world is in danger of unbuilding, as her constant cutting-off of lines at the knees suggests, it’s also first in line for recuperation. Maybe I’m finding what I want, but I see humanism, rehabilitation, give and take, here. “Hum / in lactate" she says; then, “Antagonist, never let / Go."

It’s hard for me to talk about Corina Copp’s writing without suffering.