Inventorys

About the Book

A poetic documentation of imperial structures through the story of a shipwrecked Spanish trade vessel.

In this work of hybrid historiography, Sam Creely modulates the English sentence to map the ways anglophone imperial self-fashioning moves in and out of social coherence, investigating how syntactic requirements reflect colonial history and how the rules of language structure thought. Through scenes including intimate encounters with dye, fabric, and garments, Creely reveals the sexual and racial grammars of empire.

Inventorys takes as its point of departure the voyage, shipwreck, and eventual excavation of the Spanish trade vessel El Nuevo Constante. Animated by the image of sixty thousand pounds of dye bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, this six-part poetic documentation follows the wreckage of the Constante linguistically, moving among early modern lexicography, and ultimately toward enmeshed histories of catalog, fabrication, and revision.

Inventorys is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Shane McCrae.

About the Author :
Sam Creely is assistant professor at ArtCenter College of Design. With Pia Sazani, they are a founding editor of the DanceNotes Chaplet Series and coauthor of Throat Draw Come Out With It. Inventorys is their debut poetry collection.
 

Review :
“[Creely] discover[s] and implement[s], as the book unfolds, a voice that is both intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging . . . Inventorys rewards thinking and re-thinking, reading and re-reading, as all poetry must if it is to meet that ineffable hunger for poetry all readers of poems know, which cannot finally be sated, though it can be pleased. Inventorys pleases that hunger.” “Inventorys offers a tour-de-force refusal of linguistic imperialism in six acts. Scattering syntax to the four winds, this awing debut collection excavates the wreckages of colonialism that remain embedded in our shorelines and our language use. Creely’s text traces the trajectory of an eighteenth-century Spanish vessel to offer a threnody for the extracted resources and lifeworlds marked as ‘cargo’ in the ship’s manifest. Crystallizing around the figure of the cochineal insect whose red dyes would stain the sea, Inventorys sets the reader spinning in a tempestuous whorl of lexical items and attunes us to the multispecies distributions of colonial violence. At once elegiac and agitational, this book ​lingers with histories and presents that reject the imperative to move ‘forward into forgetting.’” “Creely’s title Inventorys immediately shivers its signifier with an irregular plural that vibrates throughout this collection of poetry as it considers and reconsiders those philological and historical efforts to order and to control a fundamental condition of arbitrariness. The brilliant trope of inventory itself as a traumatic attempt to buffer the flow of production from the raw to the fabricated—from the noumenal to the phenomenal—and to ensure conventions of consumption and exchange is, paradoxically, the book’s own lyrical economy. . . . The shipwreck of the 18th century Spanish colonial frigate El Nuevo Constante along with its monetized prize of cochineal is an almost too perfect metaphor for the flotsam of an age of synthetic rationality appearing as a stain upon the waters, returned from currency to ephemera and consigned to the mud of its own universalist logic. Creely’s genius is to refine the historical epic into exile, into a dirge of loss become private (‘Cochineal cradel me’), into the ‘Slow Rosebud’ of a grandmother adrift in time. Off we go. In lines worthy of Eliot or Beckett, and in a critique worthy of Barthes, this collection, so singular in its periodicity, curates ‘what gathers behind words as they move into quiet / how heavy how creased.’” "When one tends what’s near gone of history’s 'wreck and recovery,' one dives deep to take account. Deep, yes: into love, into memory, into seas. Creely’s gorgeous and fleet Inventorys attends with tenderness that which, recovered, requires stitching into a once wounded whole of 'hefted forms of replica.' When what’s lost resurfaces, washes ashore here, in this, their assured debut, Creely wrights it, eyeing its wrack, sets it thus, back into time, recording that yes, like a family line, the ocean is full of blood; yet there remains more red than that, 'red enough for forgetting': read this to remember."