Found texts are archeological artifacts. Mac Cormack didn’t find her texts by accident. Implexures (2003) is an exploration of her ancestry, which evidently goes back to Elizabethan times (when the word “implexure,” meaning fold or folding, was still, if only rarely, in use).

The poem is in part a series of “historical letters” made of heterogeneous voices from many sources and periods—“To absorb a history of family through the centuries requires a forebear’s attention to facts and no fear of paper” (I10). The voices (and years) cannot always (and never easily) be identified or distinguished from one another—“‘Language as primary environment’ applied to re-reading letters (one’s own and others’) the decades interleaved on every surface to blur and redefine the living in & perception’s architecture” (I44-45)—except perhaps for the (italicized) letters home from a modern young woman traveling to places like Mexico, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.