Description
Poetry. "The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman's L.B. chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication—the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language—with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifer points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residuum of the body. At the level of composition, L.B. is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman's finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself."—Craig Dworkin
Author Bio
Judith Goldman is the author of VOCODER (Roof, 2001), DEATHSTAR/RICO-CHET (O Books, 2006), and L.B.; OR, CATENARIES (Krupskaya, 2011). She co-edited the annual journal WAR AND PEACE with Leslie Scalapino from 2005 -2009. She teaches in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo, focusing on contemporary North American poetry and poetics, ecological studies, biopolitics, affect theory, and media theory. Alongside AGON (The Operating System, 2017), she is at work on ______ Mt. [blank mount], a project that writes through Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' in the context of past futures and future histories of ecological catastrophe.
Author City: BUFFALO, NY USA