According to the Plat Thereof
by
Alex Tretbar
Alex Tretbar is a Midwestern writer and abolitionist. He is also the author of the chapbook Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025), and works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition.
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According to the Plat Thereof is interested in bodies, names, and the spaces through which they circulate. The construct of "the speaker of the poem" becomes a vehicle for discovery, body-swap, escape, and voyage. Jagged sonnets compete with and interrupt themselves. Urban and pharmaceutical design intersect beneath the same stoplight. "Unbodied" poems sit blankly beneath the titles that designate them like usernames. In the face of institutional exhaustion, the voice toggles between presence and vanishment. Like the plat of the book's title, the speakers of these poems are cartographical.
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“Titles, like frames, occupy a space that is at once part of the piece and outside it, which is another way of saying that titles are the edge at which the story meets the world. For most written works, titles are all one ever sees of them, the rest of the work remaining concealed behind a book cover or beneath the white space that serves to separate title from work. They are both outside the work and the outside of the work, separate from it and fundamental to our perception of it. Other parts of a work can be attributed, variously, to characters or speakers or narrators, but who speaks the title?
These six unbodied poems—one of which is titleless—take advantage, in what I want to call a Holzerian fashion, of the nonspace of the title, a voice that comes from nowhere and no one and is therefore impossible to ignore. They are, of course, a lot of fun.”
—James Tadd Adcox, Managing Editor, Always Crashing, on the "unbodied" poems of According to the Plat Thereof