Cocoon Corpus: Stuart A Woolgar

What happens when the ability to see through illusion becomes an inability to believe in anything at all?

Cocoon Corpus is a collection of poems concerned with perception, falsity, cultural construction and the dangerous seductions of negation. Moving through fractured images of politics, sexuality, authority, technology, consumer life, intimacy, art and social belonging, the poems repeatedly test the structures through which human beings create meaning.

Nothing is automatically granted legitimacy. Heroes become disposable idols. Communication produces isolation. Social roles reveal themselves as mechanisms. Knowledge deteriorates into performance. Anger becomes recurrence. Safety becomes enclosure. Even truth itself begins to appear unstable beneath sustained examination.

At first, this anti-illusion consciousness is liberating. Appearances can be penetrated, assumptions exposed and inherited certainties dismantled. But as the process continues, another possibility emerges: if everything can be subjected to the same corrosive scrutiny, what remains upon which a person can stand?

Across poems such as "Hero Blank Vulture," "Burnt Holes and Flaws," "Loops of Isolation," "Grey Solemn Nightmares," "Carrion Army," "House of Dust" and "Fumigated from Normality," the collection traces the transformation of discernment into recursive scepticism. The mind that refuses false foundations gradually discovers that negation can become a foundation of its own-and ultimately another form of imprisonment.

Structured as a movement through exterior surfaces, alienation, hardening, self-confrontation, cultural ashes and lingering afterimages, Cocoon Corpus does not offer a simple opposition between an authentic individual and a corrupted world. The observing consciousness is never exempt from its own method. Language, identity, rebellion and perception themselves become objects of examination.

The result is an abrasive, philosophical and frequently surreal body of poetry in which grotesque humour, cultural fragments, compressed argument and visceral imagery collide.

At its centre lies a paradox:

To see through illusion is liberation.

To see through everything is imprisonment.

Cocoon Corpus forms part of Stuart A. Woolgar's continuing literary archive published by Sadolynn Press.