Natural landscapes loom as sites of collective memory in Ed Steck’s Mountain Forge Serviceberry Systems. They are photo albums, sculptural frames, lines, fractures, declivities, and ascents that humans and non-humans share and to which they bear witness. As repositories of transtemporal experience, Steck’s landscape-poem works through contact and ripple effect, a chain-link of circles and divergent lines, a ragged bulge of phonetic and conceptual footholds. In this lyric place, one partakes of an unraveling landscape – a space of formations grasped as a transformative path. Hurricanes act on geology. Mountains erode. Lines appear, crumble, and re-form. Steck’s poem charts the chipping away of plane and angle to show that names alone withstand cyclonic force.

Ed Steck is a writer in Pittsburgh, is author of The Garden, An Interface for a Fractal Landscape, David Horvitz: Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film, others.