A Neon Tryst

Poetry. A NEON TRYST is a collection of ekphrastic poems featuring the films L'Eclisse (director Michelangelo Antonioni); Seconds (John Frankenheimer); and Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman). Though divided in three separate sections by film, the collection stands as one, cohesive piece, as all main characters share an internal conflict—losing identity with the passage of time. One flees an unhappy marriage and throws herself into fleeting, cold relationships against a rigid and futuristic atomic backdrop—all of her apocalyptic decisions revealing the "time bomb" within. One alters his identity completely by committing pseudocide, then undergoing an intense surgical transformation, only to return to his "old" life. The last, a retired professor in his golden years, takes a journey to his alma mater to be honored for lifetime achievement, only to discover along the way that his life has been anti-climactic at best. The three pieces as a whole illustrate that human tendency is to erase before evolving—as Daumal said, "I become conscious of myself by denying my existence"—and that this is dangerous, liberating, and necessary.

"The 'trysts' of Lina Vitkauskas's book are shot through with 'neon'—that is, they are saturated with chemicals, textures, atmosphere, and media. According to this synthetic cosmology, 'In an affair / arms laugh, / they become sheer.' That is to say, they—arms, bodies, weapons, trysts—become both medium and adjective, both see-through and material. As in Antonioni's great films, the body is clothes and the clothes are part of the visual atmosphere. A dress moves through a toxic landscape, or a 'toxic love.' The 'trysts' are movies, fantasies, art. Vitkauskas is 'surreal, primitive, impressionist, whatever.'"—Johannes Goransson