I've posted favourite passages on my blog at http://carrieetter.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/michelle-detories-after-cave-ahsahta.h...

I wrote this book for you.

You can get it here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781934103548/aftercave.aspx

& You can read a review here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-934103-54-8

this is from my author's statement:

After-Cave is a book about what it is to be alive. It is about what happens when we begin to pay attention to the act of living. That is to say—it is a book about noticing the difference between a state of being and an act of being. After this noticing there is little room for passivity.



After-Cave is also about how we are part of and separate from and rub up against the non-human world, what some might call the “natural” world or the “wilderness.” These words go in quotes because conceptually and linguistically they are made things, and what I am attempting to describe is the world that isn’t made by humans but is rather made or co-created and shaped by creatures or weather or other forces that we may or may not be able to detect or name.



The world of After-Cave is a feral landscape, a haunted place of shelters and ruins, burrows and houses, thickets and churches, mountains and factories, mud and schoolyards. Familiar and ethereal structures create incidents of habitat and erasure, wondering about the borders of the feminine, the human, the animal. In other words, it is full of mirrors.



The narrator of After-Cave begins by telling us: “I am 15. Female. Human (I think).” Right away she wishes to be known to us as she is known to herself and others, but she also needs to tell us that her relationship to those terms is uncertain, those categories and markers troubled. She is at the threshold of seeing through language, of knowing and feeling what is most difficult to say, and of knowing and feeling that what is said often hides what is truly known and felt. The parenthetical gesture of disclosing her own confusion is therefore a gesture of intimacy to the reader: she wants to tell you the truth.



Formally, After-Cave is a hybrid text that contains poetry and fragments, sentences and paragraphs, visual poetry and cartographies, and engagements with sound as sense. The page is a flexible space where language works to touch the pages’ outsides and insides, durations and rhythms, margins and edges: a sort of enacted echolocation which also troubles linear time. In this way it is, like all language, “experimental.”



In political terms, After-Cave is a feminist, feral poetics. An infiltration. A stealth poetics. Quiet, tenacious, seeking to de-domesticate language in order to render it hospitable. Tracing trajectories of power, making daisy-chains around sites of human and creaturely suffering and conflict, mourning incidents of state violence and corporate crimes against humanity and nature, while also silvering the scars of my own tiny traumas. Also: seeking potentials and hoping.



After-Cave creates and reimagines itself, recurring through repeated phrases and images, attempting to teach itself how to be written and thus how to meet its reader. This is still happening. As a map unfolds to reveal the represented territories at different scales, After-Cave asks to be passed through and considered from variable distances and orientations. Geographic and temporal and affective markers emerge and overlap and point and pivot, paths return to themselves as lines traveling the surface of a Klein bottle both define and explore its insides and outside, which can be one or the other or both simultaneously depending on location, position, or perspective. After-Cave is a little book with a leash that folds.


see more here: https://ahsahtapress.org/product/after-cave/ ( )