Mezzanine
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HUTTONIAN THEORY OF EARTH is for Felix Waechter and takes its title from mathematician and scientist John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Playfair’s book popularized the ideas of geologist James Hutton (1726–1797) and is widely considered to be the founding text of modern geology. Hutton’s was the first scientific theory to demand a serious consideration of the concept of deep time.
ON STYROFOAM draws on details from the trial of Ray Krone, who spent ten years on death row in Arizona before his exoneration in 2002 by DNA testing. In the course of the original trial, the prosecutors asked Krone to bite into a Styrofoam cup, and claimed that the bite marks on the Styrofoam cup matched marks on the body of the victim.
TRIPLE WITCHING refers to the days on which three types of financial contracts in the U.S. securities industry expire. These days tend to see higher-than-usual trading volumes and price volatility.
GENERALIZED METHOD OF MOMENTS refers to an econometric method in which moment conditions are used to estimate parameters of statistical models.
FRAGMENTS FROM THE IMAGINED EPIC: THE SONG OF HAVE BLUE is named after Lockheed Martin’s proof of concept (code-named Have Blue) for its first stealth aircraft, F-117 Nighthawk.
OBJECTIVITY AS BLANKET responds to the trial of Earl Washington, who spent more than seventeen years in prison in Virginia—many of them on death row—for a crime he did not commit. He was exonerated by DNA testing in 2001, through a biological sample found on a blanket at the crime scene.
PAWN SLIP responds to the conviction of Glenn Ford, who spent nearly thirty years on death row before being exonerated and released from Angola Prison in Louisiana on March 11, 2014. Ford died of complications from lung cancer on June 29, 2015.
THE LIST is for Sebastian Hitzig.
DIVISION DAY is in dialogue with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Stephen Hawking’s final paper, co-authored with Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, titled “Soft Hair on Black Holes.”
FRAGMENTS FROM THE IMAGINED EPIC: THE ISLAND OF STONE MONEY refers to the island of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia, where large immovable stones have been used as currency since ca. 1000 CE. Ownership of the stones is recorded through oral history and sometimes physical marks on the stones. The stones, which were quarried from distant islands, have holes in their centers to make it easier to carry them by teams of laborers. Yap was ruled by the Spanish, the Germans, and then the Japanese; when Germany bought the island in 1899, they conscripted the Yapese into labor by bankrupting the island: they took control of all the large stones in circulation by drawing black Xs on the stones. The epigraphs are adapted from ethnographer William Henry Furness’s 1910 book about the island. Economist Milton Friedman wrote a famous essay about the island, comparing the island’s monetary system to the gold standard.
DIFFERENCE ENGINE is in debt to Laurie Anderson. Its title refers to Charles Babbage’s mechanical engine for tabulating polynomial functions, a prototype for which was created in 1819 and completed in 1822.
PERNKOPF ATLAS refers to an anatomical atlas completed over a twenty-year period (1933–1953) by Austrian anatomist Eduard Pernkopf along with four artists. Pernkopf and the artists he employed were committed members of the Nazi Party and dissected prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. Lines in italics come from Helmut Ferner’s preface to the W. B. Saunders Company 1964 edition of the Atlas; and two works, Clara Leiser’s To and From the Guillotine and a memorial stolperstein, which commemorate leaders of the German resistance group referred to as the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. They were executed for their political activities. Some of their bodies were used in anatomical research.
About the Author
ZOË HITZIG is a poet and a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, and the Boston Review, and been featured by PEN America. Her writing about poetry has appeared in BOMB and Prac Crit. Mezzanine is her first book.
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Permissions
I am grateful to the editors of the venues in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in alternative forms:
Boston Review: “On Styrofoam”
Colorado Review: “Huttonian Theory of Earth”
Denver Quarterly: “War of the Currents”
Harper’s Magazine: “1st Trial for the New Aubade”
Lana Turner: “Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Island of Stone Money”
London Review of Books: “The Tamping Iron Speaks”
New Statesman: “Triple Witching,” “How We Programmed the Apocalypse,” “2nd Trial for the New Aubade”
New York Review of Books: “ Trial for the New Aubade”
The New Yorker: “Objectivity as Blanket”
Paris Review: “Gesture Atlas,” “Silent Auction” (as it appears here)
PEN America Poetry Series: “Division Day”
POETRY: “Stylized Facts”
Poets.org: “Pernkopf Atlas (I)” and “Pernkopf Atlas (II)”; “I Looked on My Right Hand and Beheld”
Sand Journal: “The Cryptographer Speaks”
Yale Review: “On Atrazine,” “Proxy Means”
Copyright
MEZZANINE. Copyright © 2020 by Zoë Hitzig. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
An extension of this copyright appears here.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from The Death of Nature, by Carolyn Merchant. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Cover design by Henry Sene Yee
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition JUNE 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297744-1
Version 04172020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297743-4
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