ÆROTOMANIA

Karasick explores commercial aircraft as a sociological artifact in this collection of poetry and prose.

Sitting in an airplane 30,000 feet in the air, traversing terrain, weather, and time, places travelers within a uniquely liminal space; time spent in that metal body yields the opportunity to look within and interrogate who we are in the world. The author, a poet and academic, uses her latest collection to render the airplane as “an erotic theater,” a “hyperculture of forces and relations…in an aerotic ecology of sovereignty and sacrifice” through which she can explore ideas of surveillance, Judaism, social norms of behavioral control, eroticism, and the agency to leave one “plane” for another. She presents this large idea with a compelling and smooth balance of poetics and scholarship, with visual touchstones of flying woven throughout (including images of oxygen masks, suitcase size limits, and a flight attendant blowing up a life jacket). Karasick plays with font, color, and the shapes of text, with pages and passages often warping the reading experience; the text of one entire page takes the form of blue bubble letters. The thesis of this collection—which reads like a multimedia essay—emerges just beyond the book’s halfway point: “The plane embodies a double bind of excess and lack / all that is material and ethereal, illusive and policed…moving through and across geo-political, socio-ethnic and gendered borders amassing memory, data enacting a multicultural polyvalent poetics of inclusion…” After a pandemic of international lockdowns and an intermission for air travel, Karasick offers a language for how engaging with the rules of flying reflects dynamics in our society at large. The opening section of the book is a collection of poems tackling similar ideas, written much more abstractly and angrily.

A high-flying, genre-bending consideration of the airplane as a social prism.