Amy Stidham

'A lemon painted yellow'

Amy Stidham

Editorial assistant Amy Stidham returns with three capsule reviews on unexpected drama. Under review: stack by James Davies, Common Place by Sarah Pinder, and Battledore by L. J. Sysko.

stack, James Davies (Carcanet Press, 2017)

Ballads, portraits, and tenses

Amy Stidham

Capsule reviews

J2 editorial assistant Amy Stidham weighs in on three new review titles: As the Verb Tenses by Lynley Edmeades, Power Ballads by Garrett Caples, and Lunch Portraits by Debora Kuan.

J2 editorial assistant Amy Stidham weighs in on three new poetry releases.

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Handle with care

A study in (poetic) fragility

Kate Siklosi

“Letraset’s rarity and fragility give it a transient quality; coupled with the intimate hand to page contact of its application, the medium itself challenges the masculinist impulse for permanence, immortalization, and enduring legacy in poetics and makes room for vulnerability and even grief.”Adaptation of a photo of Letraset in American Typewriter Bold, by Flickr user <a href=https://flic.kr/p/973b16>harleypeddie</a>. — “Letraset’s rarity and fragility give it a transient quality; coupled with the intimate hand to page contact of its application, the medium itself challenges the masculinist impulse for permanence, immortalization, and enduring legacy in poetics and makes room for vulnerability and even grief.”Adaptation of a photo of Letraset in American Typewriter Bold, by Flickr user harleypeddie.

I think of feminism as a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility: to take care. — Sara Ahmed[1]

And with such force in their fragility; a fragility, a vulnerability, equal to their incomparable intensity. — Hélène Cixous[2]

June 20, 2019

When Jacket2 invited me to compose a CFP for a special feature spanning multiple modes of thinking, it was the summer of 2017 and we were several months into Trump’s presidency. I had just returned to the United States, where I am a naturalized “citizen,” after years in Singapore, where I was employed as a faculty member on a work visa, a status determined almost solely on the state’s articulated understanding of my temporary utility to society — a condition that defines and delimits the lives of immigrants everywhere, but especially in oligarchic states (like Singapore and the US) that bank on the sweat and blood of certain bodies, the profitability of distended indenture (including debt), disenfranchisement, carceral surveillance, and other forms of coercion.

June 20, 2019