"Plato, arguably the philosopher with the most influence on the development of Western culture, famously banished poets from the idea city in the name of the philosophos with a tacitly hegemonic regard for the danger posed to the State by the massive social power of poetic eros. The title of Brenda Iijima's new work, If Not Metamorphic, promises the emergence of an 'unhindered and spiraling' structure that, as it turns out, recoups and transforms this marginalized power of eros. What occurs is nothing less than the ramified beauty of the work's own variegated measures in a 'continuum of elaboration,' wherein 'Essentiality becomes / Phantasmal' and 'Erotic / Rebellion' flies in the face of a Platonically underwritten Occident that by philosophical default knows one habitually physiopsychical state, so to speak: 'The state / Would have us / Becoming / Bland.' Anything but bland, Iijima's fantastically life-affirming work asks: 'Eureka / Or death?' My response is to read aloud in wonder and appreciation." --Christopher Rizzo.