Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Photography. Hybrid Genre. Performance Studies. Includes 32 pages of full–color textscapes, 25 half–tone documentary photos, and cover art by the author.
THE REPUBLIC OF EXIT 43 is a verbal/visual archaeology of the hazardous waste sites across the street from home and school, tucked behind the portal of an expressway: domains mute and seemingly inert. Composting Alice's adventures underground, verse channels unearthed disputes surrounding a noxious landfill and adjoining copper rod mill through the throats of nether and overworlds, from Eurydice to CEOs—mining landscape as retribution, baffle, legal battle and real estate speculation, deregulation, rogue digging and pastoral pipe dreams on the part of the harmed. Amidst the stupefaction of innumerable private and state ruses, these pages lay out how the entrails of postwar industry might be reclaimed toward a music of non–consensual citizenship where poetry is unregulated and fully integral.
"A book written against a copper and bacterial backdrop or cloth or hologram or site. To breach, to fluoresce: and in this way: the book performs its conductivity and tenderness as a relationship to suffering that resembles justice. I was deeply moved by Jennifer Scappettone's book. Book as voltage: the colors yellow and silver, red and black. Another color, a color we cannot see, a color there's no word for: folded many times. The pressure before the word arrives. The wet paper. How the fold decays and becomes a part of this other landscape. What is possible in this moment, in this light, at this time? Images hold one kind of memory in Scappettone's book; narrative another. The larger question of territory is placed next to the landfill, for example: the labyrinth, the space beneath or between. The air. The particles of the air. And, after all this time, the ground."—Bhanu Kapil
Author Bio
Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar devoted to the cross–contamination of these modes of inquiry, on the page and off. Her books include FROM DAME QUICKLY (Litmus Press, 2009), Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated on multidisciplinary performance works with a wide range of other writers, musicians, architects, code artists, and dancers. She was guest editor of the feature section of Aufgabe 7, devoted to contemporary Italian experimental poetry. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA