Photo of Justin Phillip Reed by Aysia Berlynn (@aysiaberlynn).
The questions Reed asks are as ambitious as the ways in which he explores them. Do myths obfuscate reality? How does society demonize what it fears and what might topple its configuration?
Justin Phillip Reed’s second collection of poetry — following his 2018 National Book Award for Poetry–winning debut Indecency — is a tour-de-force featuring a striking voice and artistry that will dazzle the vision, stun the ear, and demand attention.
As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”
As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”[1] Though sometimes cited as a rallying call for Language writing, the declaration’s context (e.g., the Berkeley Free Speech Movement) and afterlife (Grenier would go on to compose, among other things, drawing poems), however much a “breach,” as Ron Silliman called it, with the voice-centered p
Photo by Helena Wikström, courtesy of Caroline Bergvall, 'Drift Umeå,' NorrlandsOperan, Sweden.
During an interview from the afterlife, Jack Spicer tells Hoa Nguyen that in making a poem, “you start with a syllable machine and see what ghosts you catch.” Similarly, Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings channels a polyphonous “voice-cluster” of pop stars and feminist icons of art and literature. Bergvall and Alisoun form a “collective poesy” (104) through queer networks of affiliation to explore pleasure’s physical and linguistic role in disbanding the national ties that constrain us.
During an interview from the afterlife, Jack Spicer tells Hoa Nguyen that in making a poem, “you start with a syllable machine and see what ghosts you catch.” Similarly spirited, Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings channels a polyphonous “voice-cluster”[1] of pop stars and feminist icons of art and literature, all centered around Alisoun, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.
The title of Don Mee Choi’s new pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial mode, contains a “=” mark, a symbol that is not written language and yet conveys a recognizable meaning. The equal sign establishes equivalency: the “=” holds a mirror to the first clause, showing a second clause that’s not an exact replica, yet is in some ways a reflection. The “=” achieves what Choi approaches in her pamphlet: translation as a twinning language. As Choi writes on the first page of her pamphlet, “I come from such twoness.
Reading Brandon Shimoda’s enigmatic and haunting The Desert, one wonders about the status of the desert and the fate of place after its replacement by landscape and the “inner man.” Written between 2011 and 2014 in Tucson, Arizona, with poems set in the American desert as well as in Japan, The Desert is less a landscape or “transcendental field” than the posthistorical (non)place that follows human violence.
What is the poetry of the desert, at once a place and placelessness itself? In 1980 the critic Karatani Kōjin published Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, where he theorized the distinction between place and landscape as a historical phenomenon.
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