Sunday, May 27, 2012

IVY WRITERS new venue: CAFE DELAVILLE in Paris!

Anne Kawala, Esther Salmona et Heather Hartley will give a bilingual reading for IVY WRITERS PARIS on the 29th of May 2012 at 7:30pm and in a totally new, exciting spot for IVY--CAFE DELAVILLE! (see their site for full info on them: http://www.delavillecafe.com/index.php) 

 

You will come in past the fabulous outside terrasse and go up a set of stairs stopping for a GREAT drink at the bar and then will take to the lovely staircase at the back (shown here at left) Upstairs, all will be light, laughter and poetry! Hope you can join us! 

 

IVY WRITERS PARIS, 
Tuesday the 29th of May 
7:30 pm 
(up-UPSTAIRS)
34, bd Bonne Nouvelle
Paris, 75010
Metro Bonne Nouvelle
(ou 10 min à pied de Strasbourg St Denis)
For full info: see our blog post with bios at: 
 

Also, for anyone dying to get their hands on the beautiful GOLD issue of VERSAL, that is the VERSAL 10 anniversary issue, it will be on sale at IVY! Or else you can get your copy directly online (and see Versal's fun promo video at: 

 

http://www.wordsinhere.com/versalten.htm

 

VERSAL 10 showcases work by the authors listed here--and MORE!:



Thursday, May 24, 2012

Du recyclage aux notions du témoignage et de la mémoire: Join Ille for some talks in Mulhouse on May 26th 2012

If you are in Mulhouse next weekend and just do not know what to do with yourself, please join me as I present a talk in French as part of the Ille seminars at the FLSH, Salle Starky, UHA, Mulhouse (tram Illberg) the 26th May 2012 from 9-12h30. 

My talk is intitled: "Du recyclage aux Ready-Mades: la poésie contemporaine réinvente l'espace de la lecture". I am honored to be speaking with Philippe MESNARD from ISTI and the Paris international collège de philosophie whose talk is intitled "Quelques notions du témoignage et de la mémoire, et leur critique". See poster below for full details (click to enlarge image):


Saturday, May 19, 2012

ECRIRE L'ART 3: Frédéric Forte à Mulhouse le 27 mai 2012!

Membre d’OULIPO, poète et traducteur, FREDERIC FORTE, sera à Mulhouse cette semaine !  Il fera une lecture dans le cadre de sa mini résidence « Ecrire l’art » le 27 mai 2012 à 15h à la KUNSTHALLE de Mulhouse, la Fonderie, 16 rue de la Fonderie. Il lira des textes qu’il écrira autour de l’exposition de SIMON STARLING « 350kilogrammes par mètre carré » qui ouvrira le 24 mai (vernissage le 23).  
(Click on the image of this poster below to see in larger format:)

Member of Oulipo, poet and translator, Frédéric Forte will be in Mulhouse next week and will read at the end of his short residency "Writing Art" at la Kunsthalle Mulhouse. He will be visiting and writing about the Simon Starling show "350 kilogrammes par mètre carré". Of this show, the Kunsthalle tells us: it is "a solo exhibition of Simon Starling running from the 24th of May to the 26th of August 2012. Starling is seen as one of the most daring British artists on the international scene. Simon Starling will present new pieces at La Kunsthalle which have been created to echo the history and architecture of the Fonderie building, a rehabilitated industrial site. The Contemporary Art Centre has been housed there since 2009, as well as the University of Upper Alsace and the Mulhouse town archives.

They also add, "Simon Starling has been revisiting the history of forms and questioning ideas about the value, fabrication and status of objects for more than 15 years. His sculptures, installations and journeys are based on acts of transformation or hybridisation, through movement and in situ installations. Starling methodically separates materials from their context in order to find the unexpected links between seemingly distant domains and timeframes." 

For more on this show, or for German or French versions of these quotes, see: http://www.kunsthallemulhouse.com/programmation/exposition-trois-cent-cinquante-kilogrammes-par-metre-carre.php and download their communiqué de presse in pdf versions.

ECRIRE L’ART: 
Ce nouveau cycle d’invitations inédites s’inscrit dans le projet de recherche de la Kunsthalle autour de la médiation. Il  réunit des écrivains et des expositions. Sous la forme de « mini-résidences » de quatre jours, un auteur contemporain s’immerge dans l’univers d’une exposition présentée à la Kunsthalle et compose autour des œuvres exposées. Dialogues, créations, collaborations, poésies visuelles et sonores, textes et expressions permettent de visiter, voir, concevoir et revoir les œuvres à travers le langage spécifique de l’écrivain. Une lecture-performance publique est proposée dans l’espace d’exposition à l’issu de la résidence

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Montpellier... avril 2012

A few weeks have passed but the sounds of Montpellier, the quiet of the night, the cobalt lighting on the arcades, all that is already fading into a past. But here is a glimpse back at my first day in the heavenly south--full of quirky moments and captured in a few pics and personal ramblings below... 

On the road--the LOVE of trains. The purrrrrr of the TGV, that occasional odd jolt and screech. Towns whizz by, as the landscape changes--rising and falling against the windows. Weather, too, in a single day's ride might go through as many moods as I, enclosed in the comfort of knowing I'm sealed away from other responsabilities, can only focus work-wise and what is there, along for the ride. For this Mulhouse - Montpellier trek I had the proofs for my new book, Circuits, (coming out soon from Corrupt press).:

Arriving in Montpellier at night, fairly late, I saw little besides the tram and the spiderweb of side-streets angling towards the gorgeous Hôtel des Arceaux where I stayed. In the morning I got up, had a lovely breakfast (with the most amazing mini-POT of really dense, rich coffee and hot milk), then I began to wander. What can I say, I had big plans--walk in one direction and see what was there! 

The blues of being on holiday alone engulfed me. It seemed the overwhite sky, the grey of the stone and trees not yet fully in bud echoed that unformed interrior me.:

But then there was Alexandre Hollan's "Le chemin de l'arbre" (Musée Fabre—Montpellier Fine Arts Museum) and his 4 "écritures d'arbres, série de perceptions" goaches from 2008-2010.

The tree becomes the fibers and veins of the body, a circulatory system. Some lines, almost translucent, faded, wait for their purpose: to be filled again, grow dark and robust, perhaps burst into bud. I stood before them, my eye unable to trace out the pathways among vein-branches which were entirely too complex to visually comprehend. The eye--seeing them as a whole--trusts in their connectivity. They know the way so that our gaze does not have to locate it. 

"La légèrté est une grande force, elle soulève et porte la lourdeur."—Alexandre Hollan had written on the wall above these works. 

The entire weight of leaves would one day be upheld by the veiny branch-structure in these goaches, just as the body survives because of the tiny capillaries, veins, fibers, tendons that hold up the mass of being. The mass and the netting below it. How to make itself into surfaces and hide its force behind them? 

I wandered on, through the museum, on occasion listening in on a group visit or watching art students sketch en masse an apple or a portrait or a building. I admired the ruins of a mosque in snow in Laurens' gorgeous painting "la mosquée bleue, à Tauruis en Perse" (Salon de 1872). A place of path and passage, returning to the earth while above the sky was its cerrulean blue dome. 

Wandering away from the framed figures of nature and back out into the world of real nature, I stumbled upon a wonderfully ridiculous street art performance:


I hung around and watched them for awhile, boxed heads, startled public, a bit of improv between dance and theater. I then caught a film and on the way home to the hotel stopped into a lovely restaurant for dinner opposite the Hotel du Palais (that being behind the Palais du Justice).

KINETICS ?
I was thinking about movement, kinetic energy, passages. How some poeple just pick up a bag and hit the road. Some find themselves alone with a bag along a road. Some people fall asleep and wake up along unfamiliar roads. There, in the restaurant, the tiny pedestrian road outside was small and quiet. The Hotel du Palais sat on one side and the sleepy restaurant and its still-lit terasse sat on the other. A man read his newspaper in the terrasse, alone. (one is always reminded of Hemingway at such moments--of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place). It was too cold for the terrasse but he stayed anyway, read his paper, drank his coffee.

After, he folded the paper neatly, set it atop the table, stood, pulled his jacket back over his shoulders, buttoned up, picked up the paper again. There was a bright light over the hotel door and he glanced at the Hotel's doorway and sign. An XVIII century building--Parisien in style but with only 3 floors above the rez-de-chausée--long windows, thin balconys and tall blue-grey shutters for each window. They were all dark, shutters still open. Vacant, empty, waiting.

A car drove past and three pedestrians strolled by. I looked away as the waitres brought me my dinner and set the plate down in front of me. There were a few couples and a trio in the restaurant. Their voices were gurgling water as they talked in French, English and Italian. I looked back out to see that the lights in the hotel lobby, now lit, showed no one at their post, waiting for clients, returnees, an event.

The man and his paper were gone. His table had 2 pots of water, an empty espresso cup and saucer, a bright orange napkin, a knife, an empty water glass, a candle and a small plant in an alumninum pot on it. The green of the little plant seemed to lean out over the aluminum pot's edges towards the water pitchers and candle-flame. His table and two others were softly lit by the orange-yellow light of a bulb hung from a big tree nearby. The rest of the terrasse had been and still was in shadow, abandoned.

It was too cold tonight for a drink on the terrasse, but the old man alone with his newspaper had not seemed to mind. Soft music began to filter out of a speaker someplace. Old jazz. From the turn of another century. As I finished my dinner, a few other tables inside were still occupied, but only a few. The waitors and manager buzzed about busily, regardless...
I stroll back to my Hotel des Arceaux and take a pic from my balcony of the blue-lit arcades and the sleepy street. I seal myself in--closing the shutters--to sleep fitfully.

view from my window the next morning...

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

POEMS by Jennifer K Dick now online in Big Bridge 16

NEW POEMS online in Big Bridge 16: A poet-o-rama extravaganza issue!

Even as things are revving up for Lex-ICON in June and preparations, translations, orders are being made while finals are being doled out then graded and VERSAL 10 is about to launch in Amsterdam May 23rd (wait til you guys see that, it is STUNNINGLY gorgeous) I also have some new selections from the manuscript of the full-length version of ENCLOSURE now online at Big Bridge 16 in the special feature selected by Bonny Finberg and entitled "30 poets". I am at:  http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm 

[FYI gorgeous 1908 B&W pic. courtesy Life Google images, I found it in a great article on the contstruction of the Manhattan bridge--read it on the Bowery Boys NY City History site: click HERE to read]

A chapbook of the first section of that manuscript of mine ( entitled Enclosures--click to read) appeared a few years back with BlazeVox as a free PDF ebook. This manuscript has continued to develop and these are some of the final selections from that book (almost ready to submit into the world if any publishers want to save me the agony of that submission process and sollicit the darned thing--hint hint?) Anyway, the selection in Big Bridge 16 starts out:

   to touch lili
 
might be to see (be seen)  sudden
night-cooled overhang

                                streets

growing smaller

                                her body

dislocated by soundlessness


And continues for another 11 pages (go HERE to read more). 

I really am honored to be in this issue, which has a selection of general poetry then translations, features and a whopping 6 special sub-sections on poetry (including one on Neosurrealism--click HERE to see that one). The 30 Poets feature poetry section is dedicated to the memory of a poet I knew and loved for her work, her spirit and for every totally energized encounter I was lucky to have with her--AKILAH OLIVER (click here to hear her on PennSound). If you do not know her work, do go and get yourself copies of her books. 

The person who put together this Big Bridge poetry selection is Bonny Finberg, newly returned to NYC (and missed here in France). She opens the Big Bridge poetry section with a DEDICATION. Who are the 30 poets Bonny included in the section? They are listed here: (and links to their selections via clicking on their names):

Fanny R. Ferreira Alice Notley
Amy Hollowell Bob Holman
Bonny Finberg Carol Wierzbicki
Chavisa Woods Dorothy Friedman August
Dylan Harris Jennifer K. Dick
Jill S. Rapaport Jim Feast
Jim Harrison John Yau
Jose Padua Karen Margolis
Lisa Pasold Louise Landes Levi
Lynn Crawford Michelle Noteboom
Nina Karacosta Patricia Spears Jones
Ron Kolm Rufo Quintavalle
Thaddeus Rutkowski Sparrow
Steve Dalachinsky Tsaurah Litzky
Wanda Phipps Yuko Otomo

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Drunken Boat Issue 15 book reviews by Jennifer K Dick, including one on Against Expression by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith

Last fall with an overcharged semester I completed a series of reviews for Drunken Boat magazine. These have been programmed to appear since January 2012. So it is with great great joy I see the lovely new issue 15 is up online with 3 book reviews by me and A 4th which is a co-review-dialogue on a poet's work. I admire the web formatting and colors of the new Drunken Boat edition and the attention that went into getting this issue out, including that attention to detail by Shira Dentz the reviews editor (click to read her reviews intro).

I hope that you enjoy what I have to say on Drunken Boat's site, and will support again the presses keeping exciting experimental poetry alive by publishing it.  
Buy books, read books, review books!
keep poetry publishers out of the red!

The 4 reviews:
Review 1: Against Expression by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith
A LONG pro and con reading of the anthology of conceptual writing AGAINST EXPRESSION. (Northwestern University Press). http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/against-expression I try very hard to go through the real strengths and values of this anthology for poets, teachers, general readers and then to cover some of the problems I see with this first collection of work in English trying to address what Conceptual Poetry is.  

          I also recognize that the anthology has had a lot of publicity and cybertraffic around it--my favorite being the image posted on Lemon Hound (April 2012) stating "Conceptual Poetry Carries the Weight of Contemporary Poetry" on sites such as Ron Silliman's Blog, the Poetry Foundation, conference sites on Conceptual Literature, UBU, etc. There is much one can say about conceptual literature, much that is being said. To enter into that dialogue, perhaps pick up a copy of another fine book, Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman's theory collection "Notes on Conceptualisms" and read Ron Silliman's review of it HERE (CLICK) In which he places it on par with Spring and All and Call Me Ishmael! Or check out Marjorie Perloff's article "Conceptualisms Old and New"(2007) (available online directly as a pdf) To see what the editors of this anthology have to say about it themselves, go to Kenneth Goldsmith's interview on the BOMB magazine site which also appears on the Academy of American Poets Poet.org website at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22407 or see the Academy's "brief guide to conceptual poetry

I find interesting and amusing Ron Silliman's blog post about Conceptual Poetry vs Flarf. Very recent debates posted this April 2012 on the questions about and reactions to statements that Conceptual Literature is dead. Is it dead? (Gosh, if so, I am getting into the conversation a bit late--but no surprise there, I live far away from where this debate has been happening!) But to read a comment/reaction on that, see "The Jubilee of Poetic Crises" By Canadian poet Christian Bök (often one of the first names to come up when talking of Conceptual authors) on the Harriet site.
 
Among my criticisms in the review I wrote is a tiny remark at the end about the gender issue in this book. It is a small comment, but I admire other's addresses of it--for I know that my list of names of women that I felt should be included (which is near the end of the review) is insignificant and also would make some people furious (yes, Susan Howe is NOT a conceptual poet, certainly not in her own terms--but by the standards defined here in this anthology she would be).  To this end, Ron Silliman asks the question of whether Cole Swensen should be seen as a conceptual poet on his blog. And I enjoy the short commentary regarding Spahr and Young's writing to the authors of the anthology about "what's it about all these men" that appears at the end of Laynie Browne's questionnaire on Conceptual Poetry which was published on one of my favorite blogs, Lemon Hound.
          
Review 2 
Laura Mullen's DARK ARCHIVE.
http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/dark-archive (University of CA Press) It is always interesting to review books by an author you really like and who has been an important teacher and mentor for you. In my case, that would include many writers--evidently including Laura Mullen. This review therefore has a different feel (I hope) than the others as I did. It is a very personal review, where I am not looking at the entire book, but really focusing most of my attention on reading a single poem a bit more closely as it pertains or resonates for me across the book. I admire this book. It hurts. It aches. It excites. It rips me open on personal, narrative, lyric, formal levels. I imagine it will do the same for you!

Review 3
A Lily Lilies by Josie Foo and Leah Stein.
This dance-poetry collaboration review can be found at the direct link: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/a-lily-lilies
I had had the great joy of discovering Josie Foo's writing years ago when a friend of mine--Julie Brown (who now runs WindHorse Intuitive: http://windhorseintuitive.com/) showed me her copy of Josie Foo's Tomie's Chair (Kaya Press). It was therefore a pleasure to see what Foo has been doing since and to read through the collaborative spaces of this book. Hope you enjoy my thoughts on it!

Review 4
RONALDO V WILSON's "Poems of the Black Object" (Futurepoem Books) http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/poems-of-the-black-object
A review-dialogue with my friend and fellow poet, JONATHAN REGIER of a book we both really admire and enjoyed thinking about together. For anyone that is wondering, no, this is not a new book, not hot off the presses. It came out in 2009, and I have been reading and re-reading it since I got a copy at the AWP book fair that year. It bears relooking at critically and reminding anyone who has not read it that they should. Among the 10 best poetry books by American authors in the first decade of our new century, I would have to say this is right up there!  It won the 13th annual Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. An interview with its author by Elizabeth Hildreth appears online at Bookslut at http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_03_015753.php Author  Ronaldo V. Wilson is also the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, from University of Pittsburgh Press
          I advise anyone that has not yet gotten themselves a copy of Poems of the Black Object do so NOW--and thus also support one of the finest presses putting out books in the USA today, FUTUREPOEM BOOKS.  For more on my co-author of this review, read Jonathan Regier's first collection of poetry, Three Years from Upstate published by Six Gallery Press. 

Lastly, for anyone who has been following the Lex-ICON pre-conference blog project (an image a day for 60 days at: http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/) they will notce that the very very exciting section of Drunken Boat 15--HANDMADE/HOMEMADE was curated by Deborah Poe whose image appeared on Lex-ICON last week: IMAGE 45. Congrats on this exciting work on Drunken Boat, Deborah!


Sunday, May 06, 2012

French Elections 2012! François Hollande wins...

I imagine the streets of Paris still buzzing and yelling and dancing and horrah-ing while Mulhouse has already gone to bed--but happily. Things are changing. Certainly, after the debate the other day it seemed OBVIOUS who the choice would be here in France, but I think that even a few weeks ago Sarko would never have imagined himself moving out of this job... and onto what? And Hollande? A few weeks ago? I wonder whether he felt he had as strong a chance to make this happen, was merely lost in campaigning in hopes or really felt this was going to take place. My friends were devided--the pessimists who said we were in for another 5 years of havoc and downward spirals, others who--like me--were unsure what direction the wind was about to take us, and the third, happy category of complete optimists, in which sat only ONE actual person that I knew personally. He was entirely convinces that Hollande would win, and he was constantly voicing that sureness and optimism all about him--and it was lovely to hear and tonight I salute his faith in the candidate we all saw get elected.

For me, it marks an unfortunate moment. I should have filed for nationality. After all, at this stage in my life and tenured career here what happens politically can have a clear (and sudden) impact on me. So I was regretting not being able yet to cast a vote for a country that has now been mine for the better part of my adult life. And I thank the French men and women who did go out and vote today and made their opinions count.I raised a few glasses to and with you tonight in the Place de la Concorde in Mulhouse in front of the siège of the PS. 

I was impressed, at the Place de la Concorde here in what is a little, post-industrial city struggling to remake itself on many levels and with a reputation for voting right (and even extreme right) but which voted Hollande as a city (as did Strasbourg--Go Alsace!--) that there were so many young people out--not just kids with their parents, but a large contingent of PS supporters wearing the party t-shirts and who evidently have been working for this election were the age of many of my students. Professors often talk--that old cliché of now versus then, of how things are versus some nostalgia for an earlier, smarter, more engaged moment. So, seeing these young supporters rejuvenated my hope for the future. And the French government site on the elections estimates that 79.9% of those eligible to vote in the election voted. Good for voters! Stay engaged! Keep fighting for what you believe!

And on that excited note, I shall say good night--as, like the rest of Alsace just coming back to work and getting back to school after our spring break, it is time to head to bed and to sleep and to perhaps dream that this election will lead to some better politics in the 5 years to come. Certainly, the pressure is on for Hollande--the first PS president elected since Mitterand. There will be comparisons and hopes, but also the ferocious critics will be waiting to nip and bite at his heels the first chance they get. It will be tough, so let us all have a little dream of seeing this work!  

To close--a little re-cap of ce soir in photos:

Arriving to watch the crowd waiting to hear the election results. 
2 Photos taken just minutes before 20h00.

Dahia arrives and someone has given her a sign--so we 2 foreigners have a little photo session waiting for the election results...
 The moment as the television announcers seem to be about to say what this audience wants to hear...
Are we hearing correctly? Up in front, one of the young supporters cracks open a bottle of Crémant, showering those that have yet to react to the news that yes NOW IS THE MOMENT:
Quickly, the joy beings to spread throughout the crowd!
The merry dance of HOLLANDE a gagné, 
avec 52% (selon les éstimations) 
 Between Sarkozy's concession speech and Hollande's address of the French, a little music is played in Place de la Concorde, Mulhouse:

The night has come on, blue and calm, and the evening is drawing to a close at Place de la Concorde, Mulhouse, Alsace, France. Isn't this a lovely image of the blueness?
 
The end of the evening, the rain over, the crémant drunk, the dances danced, the flowers fading or tucked into jackets to carry home--and a few signs like this one here that had likely been used as an umbrella during the brief storm that passed over mid-evening disintigrated by the rain. 
 
And to end, Hollande's slogan--
LE CHANGEMENT, C'EST MAINTENANT (Change is now!)




Friday, May 04, 2012

The final issue of ACTION POETIQUE, n° 207-210

Getting the massive 4-numbers in one final number of Action Poétique (1950-2012) is like watching the white whale being sunk, the gigantesque adventure of French criticism and poetry is being dis-activated (de-actioned, like decommissioned). (FYI: this photo is of the avant-dernier number as I have not found one of the new, final issue online yet) 

I only finally subscribed (instead of picking up a copy now and again) this last year and am saddened to see this review go. It brought me so many texts over the years--on Mallarmé, on American poets being read and translated into French, on Anne-Marie Albiach when I was working on my PhD on her work, that fun pink pink issue on Dada a few years back, and so much much much more. It is thanks to Action Poétique that I stumbled across certain French poet-critics for the first time (Pascal Petit, Liliane Giraudon, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Mitsou Ronat, Isabelle Garron, Frédéric Léal, Franck Venaille and others who have works in this final issue) and felt engaged and informed by what such French poet-critics were thinking over the years. This is a sad, sad day. 

As Hervé Martin cited on his blog announcing this issue as the penultimate arrived: "Pascal Boulanger a écrit en 1998  Une Action Poétique de 1950 à aujourd'hui, disponible chez Flammarion." For anyone who wants to hold onto the great legacy of Action Poétique, get a copy of issue 207-210 as it also contains a DvD of all the preceding issues (and their table of contents lists). It is thus an archive gift and a mournful wave farewell.

And also--for anyone in Paris who is wanting to get in a last hurrah with the editors and authors of the review, Michèle Ignazi bookstore is hosting a reading event with Henry Deluy and the editors of Action Poétique the 14th of May: 

 

A l'occasion de la parution de
l'ultime numéro de la revue
Action Poétique
1950-2012
 
rencontre avec
 
Henri Deluy
et l'équipe de la rédaction
 
le lundi 14 mai 2012
à partir de 19 heures
 
Henri Deluy présentera également ses derniers livres
L'heure dite
(Flammarion)
Poètes néerlandais de la modernité
(Le temps des cerises)
Manger la mer
Soupes et bouillabaisses à travers le monde
(Al Dante)
 
AT:  
Librairie Michèle Ignazi
17, rue de Jouy
75004 Paris
01 42 71 17 00
 

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

40's project mini-review 8: Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene

I have unexpectedly become a fan of Bhanu Kapil's books these last years. One enters each through revisitation. Her texts are like places--you arrive as a foreigner, hesitant, seeing the unusual, the unexpected, but you continue to explore and reread lines and paragraphs and pages until you fall in love and feel at home in the world she has made for you.

Kapil's works have an immediate poetic draw where one encounters dazziling lines like in SCHIZOPHRENE (Nightboat books, 2011) "It's already late. A black world coming down from the heavens. Black with stars."(p9) A few pages get read over and over again, and then you are hooked. There is something hard to explain about how her works connect--they feel at once dense and loose, not unlike how her own personal blog functions--http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.fr/.

At work is collage, lines--and spaces between those lines--as she writes: "When it's rotted to the bone, the paper is covered with metallic fur, which is not paper. 'It was a contemporary voice that had the same power as a foundational voice.' No. It's a first line, then a second, the fragments overlapping with a visceral sound, where the pages stick. I unstick them to see. To read." (p58, Schizophrene)

We, too, as readers, unstick these pages, see and read, feel the visceral, the unexpected violence in parts, the beauty in others. We are jerked back and forth between them, and the surprise awakens some process in us--involvement, engagement.

What I found particularly interesting--and I have yet to decide whether I liked or disliked this tranparency--was that with this short work, Schizophrene, there is also a curious transparency of process--beginning with "Passive Notes" which introduces this book, speaking transparently about what the author had wanted (to write an epic) and how what is here came about through failure and rebeginnings (tossing out the notes--which later becomes line one of the text itself, "I threw the book into the dark garden."(p1))--and closing with her "acknowledgements and quick notes" which again reveals process by revealing encounters both artistic and educational (things learned, from whom) which helped this book come to be: "From cross-cultural psychiatry, I learned that light touch, regularly and impersonally repeated, in the exchange of devotional objects, was as healing, for non-white subjects (schizophrenics) as anti-psychotic medication. In making a book that barely said anything, I hoped to offer: this quality of touch." (p71).

For anyone interested in montage, collage, books of place, of journey, of language, books which are looking at the foreigner and a sense of home or estrangement--this is for you. It is delicate and fierce, and though small, is large in its scope and is magnified by its own need to be read and read again. Schizophrene, like Kapil's body of work, is a correspondance with its readers, opening in them to new spaces of langauge.