Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in
That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into
another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously
reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between
unlikely terms--highlighting the very notion of exchange between the
linguistic and the physical realm. Maxwell's poems are both generous and
demanding. While the operating intelligence behind the poems incessantly
questions how one makes a life in language (and vice versa), the poems
themselves enact arrangements that might make such pathways possible.
These restless and inventive poems provide feats of language that lead
us to agree with Maxwell's speaker when she says: Our awe is our
confession.