The Elephants

Detonated Mirror is a collection of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest: a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, yet at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. Larsen's collection is a place of aliens, the atom bomb, scorching sunlight and rough, bony terrain: a place where conspiracies, warfare, and the story of humans, animals and the earth collide in extraordinary ways. The poems explore in a visionary context the explosive and prismatic slippages on the perceived borders of self, lover, land, animal, and consciousness. Sparse, rhythmic pieces share space with prose poems that explore the narrator’s “secret body”. These, in turn, share space with horrific, disorderly, anarchistic poems that buck at the underside of lyricism and playfulness with unhinged rage and obsessions with the grotesque aspects of the body, and of its sex and sexuality. These twisting, roving poems are grounded in paradox and sublimity, and in the often magical, ultra-sensory encounters between bodies, beings, and landscape.


Larsen would like to acknowledge that parts of Detonated Mirror were written on unceded sovereign lands of the Ohlone people, the Southern Paiute people, the Pueblos peoples, particularly the Northern and Southern Tewa and the Chiricahua Apache (Oakland and San Francisco, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Santa Fe, NM; and Gila, NM, respectively).