Heliopolis: Lisa Jarnot’s rewriting of a legendary city

Abstract

In her second book Ring of Fire, American poet Lisa Jarnot offers the reader a dynamic sixteen-poem sequence entitled Heliopolis. Jarnot’s Heliopolis uses the legendary City of the Sun as a starting point, but rather than describe or depict the life of antiquity, Jarnot considers the city as an ongoing posthuman vortex where animals perform a range of implausibly or absurdly anthropomorphic actions. Moreover, Jarnot’s recursive poetic structures both heighten the rhythmic and ludic qualities of the actions described while toggling between poignant humor and ethical confrontation. This essay seeks to examine what the social and ethical implications are in Jarnot’s reimagining of this legendary city. Moreover, the work of Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, and others within posthumanist discourse will be considered as a critical lens into how Jarnot is leveraging playfulness and anthropomorphism. Why does Jarnot consistently (re-)present non-human animals in her poems? How do her stylistic gestures collapse distinctions between physical and temporal boundaries?