The Shambling is a collection of poems that centers around the American cinematic image of the zombie, a creature brought back from the dead and bent on consuming the flesh of the living. Unlike the ghost who returns from the dead in order to right some wrong, the zombie returns from the dead without a reason and can not be stopped. Unlike the ghost, the zombie is corporeal and its threat is not to the individual or to a closed group, but to all of civilization. The zombie haunts me because it is without origin and it seeks no conclusion. Thus zombie as an image and a mythology is open for exploration. Because the zombie is a dark image, I use it as a mode of psychological reaction, a reaction against literary expectation, as a reaction against poetic propriety and as an idea of social limitation which manifests as subconscious longing for the destruction of society.
Some of the poems are cinematic and concretely narrative. These seek to explore the social aspects of the zombie. Their themes are personal and post-apocalyptic, toying with the idea of physical deterioration as metaphor for the deterioration of concreteness in poetry and as an expectation of how poetry ought to function, i.e. concretely. Other poems have more energy, anxiety and movement. These poems move away from the concrete by allowing more linguistic possibility to intrude beyond meaning. With this deterioration of meaning I hope to suggest or reflect some kind of mental decay as a kind of metaphor for mindlessness. These poems can be thought of as being invested with the kind of sickness that causes human beings to turn in to zombies. They also seek to represent the deterioration of sense as a metaphor for the descent into zombie-like mindlessness. These poems are those in which the impulse toward sense is most dissolved. These poems are in homage to Paul Celan, and thus are the furthest from clearly making sense. They blur the distinction between sickness and wellness as an exploration of the gap between meaning and language, between concreteness and abstraction.
Finally, the whole text is broken up by short, narrow poems I call teeth and which are titled as different kinds of teeth. These poems are designed to be interludes between the larger body of the book which allow the reader to masticate on the possibilities of what he has read. Teeth are a recurrent theme of the book and one which represents the bridge and terminus, the junction between all the possibilities of the book, living and dead, zombie and non-zombie, language and meaning, the spoken, the silent and the eaten.
