Description
Poetry. Artforum "Best Book" of 2010. "At the beginning of her astounding new book, Joan Retallack posts a warning from Immanuel Kant 'against arguing directly from the logical possibility of concepts to the real possibility of things.' It seems to me that Retallack has succeeded brilliantly by flouting Kant's injunction. 'The real possibility of things' shimmers and sings on every page of PROCEDURAL ELEGIES, creating a living entity through means that remain as mysterious as they are vital"—John Ashbery.
Author Bio
Joan Retallack is a poet and essayist with a background in philosophy and visual arts. Poetry volumes include Errata 5uite (Edge Books) chosen by Robert Creeley for a Columbia Book Award; AFTERRIMAGES (Wesleyan); How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Classics); PROCEDURAL ELEGIES/WESTERN CIV CONT'D/ (Roof Books, 2010)—an Artforum Best Book of 2010, and BOSCH'D (Litmus Press, 2020). She has received a Lannan Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and two Gertrude Stein Awards. Her friendship with John Cage led to MUSICAGE (Wesleyan), a volume of their conversations on Cage's compositional poetics. Retallack's The Poethical Wager (California) is a widely influential sequence of experimental essays on ethics and poetics, as well as the form of the essay itself. In 2018, Litmus Press published THE SUPPOSIUM edited by Retallack as documentation and continuation of a MoMA event she organized in collaboration with Black Dada artist Adam Pendleton. BOSCH'D—Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions rejiggers ancient and contemporary wagers on textual forms of "poethical courage." With gravitas and humor, Retallack considers our species' best and worst proclivities in medias res of the Anthropocene.
Author City: ANNANDLE-HUDSON, NY USA