Huttonian Theory of Earth

Zoë Hitzig

When the swallows haul up into skywe would correct their color with digitalprojection. We would look into the eyeof the projector. It will singe our retinas.Make lace of them. We swoonover the geometry of vision. It isthe geometry of a postcard plus a point.Sleeping above rooftops I hear a truckloading / unloading as the dawn stilltakes requests. Its long low lowingthe desperate voice of granite pushingmetamorphic schist or the corporateannouncement that another uncomformityhas been amassed by the seabed.But you know this. You finger the palmlinesof the seafloor. Tell me does evolution failto track independent truth or must we constructfiner tools, weightier estimations? Tell me—

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photo of Zoë Hitzig

Zoë Hitzig is a poet and author of Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020). Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Harper’s, Lana Turner and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in economics at Harvard, she currently resides in Allston, Massachusetts.

Cover of Mezzanine

New York, New York

HarperCollins

"Do we sound like robots or do robots sound like us? In poems of conscience, intelligence, and wit, Zoë Hitzig presents arguments in support of both possibilities. Mostly, throughout Mezzanine's many ingenious premises and modes of address, what I hear is an ageless stark wisdom calling us to decide who and what we are, and what we are willing to heed."
—Tracy K. Smith

"[An] astonishing literary debut... This poet indicts all of us for historical crimes against the first person. At the edge of extinction, she carries on her inquest into identity, however fugitive its traces may be."
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager

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