ABSTRACT
Fresh Kills: a landscape yielded from half a century of “mounding,” or the dumping of up to 29,000 tons of trash per day, for decades the largest of its kind in the world. Such massiveness abstracted from its contents isn't articulate, and a monument to consumption, on land still off limits, has to exist in time, in transit. This is how a writer came by fits and starts to salvage garbage by threading the dregs of post-consumer language for a chorus: 150 million tons of trash, as sheer lumpen mass, balks eloquence.
