Reviews - March 2015

Stein's wedding cake

Rachel Blau DuPlessis with the Italian edition of Stein's 'Tender Buttons,' published by Liberilibri in Macerata in 1989 and 2006, translated by Marina Morbiducci and Edward G. Lynch, with an introduction by Nadia Fusini.

How can Stein’s Tender Buttons be one hundred years old? We are still eating the buttercream frosting and rosebuds from that three-tiered cake: “Objects,” “Food,” “Rooms.”

Playing Stein

'Roastbeef,' by Kate Huh.
'Roastbeef,' by Kate Huh.

Tender Buttons is the future. Neither cipher nor code, the grammar of Tender Buttons forces the reader to play Stein. Stein’s obsession with perspective, her collection of objects, food, rooms, produces a scene of constraints (the rules of the game): a discrete spatial field where coordinates shift as the text’s gravity swerves. A game board. No, a bored game.

After Stein's closet

A tender reading from 'Tender Buttons'

Angela Carr reads at Kelly Writers House 'Tender Buttons' celebration, October 2
Angela Carr reads at the Kelly Writers House 'Tender Buttons' celebration, October 2014.

I read “A Substance in a Cushion” as a sexy, humorous love poem that plays on a little calamity and a little calm in the closet. Its sweetness and its resolution are very likely embodied in the same hand that does the sewing.

Twenty-two on 'Tender Buttons'

For the 100th anniversary of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, published in a corrected centennial edition by City Lights Books in 2014, Jacket2 invited a number of writers to pen “microreviews” — short, impressionistic, discursive, or momentary reflections on the book which first appeared in 1914 in a print run of 1,000 by Claire Marie and has been republished since by Green Integer, Gordon, Sun and Moon, and others.

'Is there. That was a question. There was no certainty.'
Andrea Quaid
Sarah Posman
Star-light and 'Rooms'
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Rachel Galvin
'Tender Buttons' and noise poetics
Seth J. Forrest
Michael Farrell
Marcella Durand
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
EC Maxe Crandall
A tender reading from 'Tender Buttons'
Angela Carr
Laynie Browne

'A Long Dress'

A long dress walks independently, down your street, any street. The “current that presents a long line” is also your leg, an ambling thought-object. A long dress in Stein is shorn, woven of substantial “crackle.” Use it to carry live ingredients, figments, ammunition, endearments, “machinery.” Employ a long dress to navigate “current” or “serene length.”

Engage a long dress to compile the histories of a “necessary waist.”