A Revolutionary Calendar

With expert grace and subversive panache, Zoë Skoulding has written a collection of 360 five-line poems gathered into twelve sections of thirty poems each—a form that replicates that of the Republican Calendar that was created in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. Each “month” of poems uses the five-line format differently; each of the individual poems responds to a single element of the phenomenal world and all are attentive to the rounds that phenomena follow. The resulting sequence of meticulous observations and penchant forays that inform A Revolutionary Calendar maps out a temporal intersection, bringing historico-political time (linear and progressive) into conjuncture with seasonal agricultural time (cyclical and recursive). Both are revolutionary, though in different senses, and likewise Skoulding’s magnificent Revolutionary Calendar is very much a book of turns and chart of changes. It is a book for every year.
— Lyn Hejinian, Professor of Poetry UC Berkeley