Literary Nonfiction. New and Expanded Edition. "In 'Eco-logic in Writing,' one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, 'Seeing the the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one's living make?' What more crucial question for those concered not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It's in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called 'the rim of occurring.' 'Writing on rim' is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino's Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one's times, 'altering oneself and altering negative social formation,' is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: 'The future creates the past.'"—Joan Retallack

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
author site
Alyse Bensel @ NewPages
Patrick James Dunagan @ Galatea Resurrects