Does culture invent language or does language invent culture? In Susan Schultz's Memory Cards & Adoption Papers both realities teeter and crash, making Origin a profligate occasion without end. These poems examine the dynamics of Being through the linguistic portholes of individual and collective history, knowing all the while that "our natural language is translation, and we cannot get it right..." And yet, even inside the simulacrae where "the language is a nomad..." which "eventually...pulls up its tent...," Schultz's dedication to the living imaginary is unflinching. "What we owe the commonwealth is allegiance to the common," she writes, and Memory Cards & Adoption Papers reifies that fealty. A brilliant book!

--Claudia Keelan, author of Utopic and other volumes