David Anson Lee on His Poems
These poems approach horror as a disturbance in the systems we ordinarily trust to tell us what is real: vision, medical imaging, memory, architecture, the body, and even the boundaries between observer and observed. I’m interested in the moment when an apparently reliable instrument: a scan, a diagnosis, a house, a familiar landscape, a human eye; begins producing evidence that cannot be reconciled with ordinary reality. In that sense, the horror is not simply something that enters the world; it is something that alters the world’s ability to remain legible.
Medicine and horror seem particularly compatible to me because both depend upon acts of looking. The clinician studies the body in search of an explanation; the horror writer asks what happens when the thing being examined looks back. Across these poems, perception becomes increasingly unstable, and what initially appears to be metaphor begins to acquire physical consequence. I’m interested in that threshold: the point at which observation becomes participation, recognition becomes uncertainty, and the act of seeing becomes an invitation to be seen.