Poetry. Sarah Messer's BANDIT LETTERS are an archive of rebellion: against coherence and for multiplicity. Her cast of elusive outlaws, who encounter the borders and borderlands of experience and identity, appear, reappear, and disappear in landscapes that conjure the Wild West, Colonial New England, and a pop-culture-strewn American present tense. Out of the rubble of this new old world, Messer builds a time-traveling and willfully anachronistic poetry that challenges our commonplace notions of history, gender, and power. At the heart of these poems lies an exploration of what is lost when bodies become language and, just as importantly, what is gained when words touch flesh.