Poetry. ZITHER & AUTOBIOGRAPHY is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled ZITHER Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood--especially of years spent in Asia--experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion." ZITHER opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters, or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA
Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays. Granary Book just published a collaborative book by artist Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino, titled The Animal is in the World like Water in Water. Scalapino's It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 was published by University of California Press at Berkeley in 2008. Other books of Scalapino's poetry include DAY OCEAN STATE OF STARS' NIGHT (Green Integer), a collection of eight years; ZITHER & AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Wesleyan University Press), The Tango (Granary Press), ORCHID JETSAM (Tuumba), Dahlia's Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2 Publishers); a reprint of the prose work DEFOE by Green Integer; and IT'S GO IN/ QUIET ILLUMINED GRASS/ LAND (The Post-Apollo Press).
Reviews and Other Links
http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_2_2004/current/alerts/sirignano.htm
author site