“Eight Track, Oana Avasilichioaei Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei’s follow-up to Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015) is a transliterary exploration composed of eight “tracks” plus two bonus tracks, each of which explores one of the various meanings of the word “track”: musical track, a physical path, marks left by a person or animal, speech tracking, animal and human tracking, and systems of surveillance. The collection’s title nods to the obsolete technology of the eight-track tape, popularized in the sixties and seventies, and the poems use some aspects of the eight-track metaphorically and formally: sound degradation, low versus high fidelity, wow and flutter (slow or rapid pitch fluctuation of a signal in recorded sound), and splicing and looping techniques. The book’s arrangement, design, and size may also echo certain aspects of the actual eight-track object. Eight Track asks what these “track” concepts can mean poetically and politically, on the page and beyond the page, engaging with ideas of language as trace and sound, language as surveillance and resistance, notions of insertion, rearrangement, and variance, dialoguing between various political, linguistic, and genre boundaries. Polyphony inhabits Eight Track in voice and form: some of the series are long poems, while others are hybrids of poetry and other genres, including black-and-white photography, drawing and illustration, audio transcriptions, radio drama, audio art, echoes of other systems of discourse – philosophy, gloss, theatre, travelogue, translation – and beyond the book, multimedia performances of some of the series. Implicitly, surreptitiously, between its discordant melodies, Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track asks: How can a trace be sonically and visually embodied? What do our systems of surveillance reveal about ourselves? How does language oppress? How does it resist? Can the poem act as a tracking system?”–
