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A Review of Paul Metcalf's U.S. Dept. of the Interior |
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In Paul Metcalf's U.S. Dept. of the Interior we encounter texts pertaining to earthquakes, migraines, colonization, and settlement, as well as a deceptively straightforward account of an academic conference in Anchorage Alaska. The settlement described runs a North South axis as does the schism implied by the description of the hemispheres of the brain affected by migraine. The variety of academics, businesspeople, natives, and transplants that coalesce in the conference in Alaska represent intellectually the geographic faultlines that underscore their setting. Throughout, the reader is asked to bear the contradictions of the materials presented against each other, but the real work has been done by Metcalf and what he accomplishes with his words and with the words of others few in this century or the one preceding it have attempted. |
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