This writing on Julie Patton's writing is done from a set of collected but non chronological and selected randomly emails sent or forwarded by Julie Patton to Rachel Levitsky. The emails are various and organized in no particular order here. A more sustained editorial effort by the poet and fiction writer Barbara Henning will support a book length project of Patton's emails, to be published by Belladonna* Collaborative.
Date: August 29, 2013 12:27:51 AM EDT>Rhapsody blue chagrin. on the line music and time. the pattern is justice as measure and >balance, glitz and hallways Send Her Ella and loose lip comedians. Bruce & Pryer must say. >Sammy D would be. Nevertheless reaching for a tango right outside the doors vaudevile and >more. blues in between. Notes, kissing cousins but not one holocaust after another spurred >pilgrimace book bleeding cover to cover mEnding something ancient and lost.
Erika Staiti lives in Oakland and comes back to New York, where she’s from, about twice a year.
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The first thing I notice in the excerpt from The Undying Present is Staiti’s use of multiple and switching pronouns and the determined unnaming of characters. It has an effect of denuding the narrative, by generalizing the action, muting agency.
We readers are instructed that something else is happening, something structural, not personality-based, although the central action is driven by a narrator.
Social reading