Calling all trilobites: join us for lunch on The Lunch Thread! Whether you're a scavenger of thought, a filter-feeder of fine phrases, or a hunter of metaphorical meaning, we invite you to scoot your segmented selves over and dig in! Let’s talk about the books you're reading—fossilized favorites or freshly molted finds—the topics you're exploring through poetry and poetics, the panel ideas you dream of surfacing, the things that irk you about the poetry world, and the curious links or tidepools you've discovered lately. Come as you are—calcified, soft-bodied, or newly segmented—and let’s lunch!
Hi fellow Trilobiters, thought I'd share this book review I wrote a while back for "Ctasy,— of shapes off shore" by John Paetsch (Hiding Press). An awesome book, and I think somer of the book and review's elements flock to our shared interest in trilopoetics (how about some pabulite poetics?)! Excited to read more from other fossil-brained contributors soon.
Thanks for sharing your review—Ctasy is definitely a wild reef of a book, and your write-up captures its churn beautifully. Where Ctasy revels in metabolic chaos—language as predation, as half-digested text-matter swirling in a tidepool of references—I’d argue pabulite poetics is in many ways the volatile twin of trilopoetics. Pabulite poetics is flux: urgency, crisis, voices gnawed down to bone. It mirrors our ecological now with its slurred overload and refusal of linear digestion. Powerful, yes—but for us trilobiters, there’s something to be said for what gets preserved after the storm. Where pabulite poetics dissolves identity into collective slurry, trilopoetics looks at the imprint left behind: the trace, the echo, the durable articulation of thought across deep time. It’s what happens when the digested language hardens, quiets, and takes shape. Maybe that’s the interplay we need: pabulite poetics burns through the now, devouring language in a frenzy of adaptive mutation. But trilopoetics reminds us that not everything must be metabolized. Some structures—some phrases, some forms—endure. They get buried, compressed, and still manage to speak.
