I, Engine: Collected & New Works

In the poems of Imogene Engine, images haunt the text. Lists, memories, quotations, poems, verbal games and explorations, citations, theoretical ephemera, doodles, snatched handfuls of conversation, bibliographic data, isolated verses: all are lain and tangled together as they pass through her life and onto the page. We feel the cold calipers of language, the scandal of naming, listing, sorting, the indifferent violence of taxonomy; but from it issue forth, or are interpolated, images wherein memory and myth and dream burn through like light, oscillant. These images recur from text to text, recombinant, and their shifting recurrence creates a linguistic collage that permeates the work. The poems are constellations, not objects. In them, she collages thought-or rather, perceives that thought and perception play within the logic of collage, that it is within the dynamics: separate-together, distinction-relation: that the subject brings her self to life, and returns to look at what Other is not here. -Olchar E. Lindsann, from the Introduction.