Work in Progress

I am currently writing a documentary poem that focuses on the world’s tallest artificial waterfall, Cascata delle Marmore, which was constructed by the Roman empire through a system of dams and aqueducts. Marmore was considered an essential stop on the Grand Tour—a cultural sightseeing trip through Europe traditionally undertaken by aristocratic British men—and the falls are therefore captured in poems and paintings by the likes of Turner, Shelley, and Byron. In the early twentieth century, engineers diverted the waterfall to provide hydroelectricity to a nearby steel plant that produced war ships and munitions for Mussolini’s fascist war effort. The waterfall is now a popular tourist attraction. The poem positions the waterfall as both a public infrastructure project built to sustain collective life and a critical node in the vast technical and cultural networks of multinational capital and western imperialism.

Read early excerpts in Dialogist and Grain.