Personal Volcano

Take Laura’s Geologics as aid and guide on our present slog through the dark wood. 

Moriarty’s sweeping volcanology spews forth a history of the scientific, intellectual, and popular imagination of the (extra)terrestrial crustal phenomenon. Invoking the Romantics, but with a Modernist-feminist slant akin to Dickinson’s or Moore’s, Moriarty witnesses the volcano, along with what happens to it (and not to mention all the earth) when held by the imperial gaze; from oil wells to nuclear bombs, technologies of our extraction economy gush and explode. “But where are we in all this stone?” the petropoet asks. In response to her own question, and in a gesture that turns the Romantic sublime on its head, Moriarty crystallizes how in the aftermath of human cruelty and love, after historical time itself, it is the volcano that will erupt again, amid so much other vibrant, shuddering matter.