I Am This State Of Emergency

What does the campaign-speak and/or ideology that filters into our everyday speech actually mean when we use it to define ourselves, or others? What are we willing to say to our friends and acquaintances in the name of debate? How deeply are American party affiliations rooted in real belief versus a taste for rhetorical bloodsport? Under what circumstances is democracy more noise than signal?
"I Am This State Of Emergency" addresses these questions, but it does not necessarily answer them. Composed over the better part of a decade, these poems feature many different speakers. Sometimes those speakers broadcast, sometimes they receive, and sometimes they trigger their sirens simultaneously. But, no matter how cacophonous the results, author Robin Myrick listens with uncompromising care. In the process, she reveals the raw human emotions throbbing beneath those ostensibly authorless talking points that increasingly determine our collective fate.

Robin Myrick is a conceptual and experimental artist working in photography, writing, and hybrid forms. Her projects often engage the transitory nature of the mediated moment, as expressed through television and film, portraiture and the body, and the rhetoric of identity, politics, consumerism, and disaster. She holds an MFA in Writing and Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts. "I Am This State Of Emergency" is her first book.