Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes militant cross-genre experiment, combining elements of (largely non-narrative) fiction, with those of local journalism, and of cultural and literary criticism. Its twenty-six interlocking "essays with characters" (plus a "Coda") explore the mid-2000s financial "crisis," the spread of neoliberalism, and attempts by activists and artists to counter it, through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In POSITIONS, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever's needed in her approach to the subject, whether it's the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship's critical patchwork, or characters set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is the second work in Belladonna*'s Germinal Texts Series, which seeks to trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce.
Author Bio
Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, including POSITIONS OF THE SUN (Belladonna*, 2018), The Unfollowing (Omnidawn Books, 2016), THE WIDE ROAD (with Carla Harryman, Belladonna*), SITUATIONS, SINGS: COLLABORATIVELY COMPOSED POEMS (with Jack Collomb, Zephyr Press, 2007), THE BEGINNER (Tuumba Press, 2002), SLOWLY (Tuumba Press, 2002), HAPPILY (The Post-Apollo Press, 2000), and SIGHT (with Leslie Scalapino, Edge Books, 1999). With Barrett Watten, she is the co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982- 1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan University Press, 2013/2015). She is the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. In addition to her other academic work, she has in recent years been involved in anti-privatization activism at the University of California, Berkeley.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA