In the chapbook epigraph, Diane R. Wiener's Flashes & Specks invokes Walt Whitman: "The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time-the curious whether and how, / Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?" Whitman's phrasing opens the door to a broad variety of poems that offer themselves as flashes and specks.
The collection creates a cross-temporal landscape and waterscape of intermittent and overlapping themes, including friendship, familial alliances-both chosen and sanguineous-ecology, ephemerality, and equity. These themes co-mingle with and manifest via elements of irony, play, magic, and fantasy. The poems employ whimsy and seriousness simultaneously.
Climate change, life at home, and myriad animals and other beings in nature center-and are centered by-the collection's orientation toward memory, mysticism, and hylozoism. While interpretations are always up to the reader, the poems are underscored by neuroqueer sensibilities. Contemporary local and global events, including social violence, oppression, and wildfires, are exposed through wordplay and metaphysical approaches toward cerebrality, emotional variance, and matrix-like thinking.
Like the steampunk watercolor and ink chapbook cover by artist Lucy Wales, a new world is imagined in these poems that fuses with while separating from its own past. On both personal and macro-level scales, mourning and honoring the old accompany hoping for the new; cautious optimism engages with critique, to suggest not nostalgic but reflective concurrent truths in a fragile present and plausible future. Society, family, and self are described in a context where nearly everything is or might be welcomed-except fascism.
Erasing while underscoring distinctions, centering Crip consciousness and Disability cultures, and believing in the possibility of sentience everywhere, the poems range from koan-like to lyrical narrative in the context of a time imploded by political crises, social unrest, a global health emergency, and the changing of the guard.
