It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant

An astonishing new collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context.

How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger’s new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system–heart and lungs and blood–than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. “I’d like to think,” Winger writes, “it doesn’t matter / what we meant.” But is that right? Could it ever be?

Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1’s dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor’s punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.