Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics

Published: 03/26/2018

Trouble Songs is a hybrid serial work that tracks the appearance of the word “trouble” in 20th- and 21st-century American music. It reads (and sings) songs and poems, with reference to cultural events ranging from the death of a pop singer to the growth of popular resistance movements. The trouble singer invokes the word “trouble” in[…]

Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays

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Published: 09/26/2017

In this collection of longer essays nested within brief, lyrical meditations, each piece focuses on some micro aspect of everyday life as a means of exploring complex macro systems—families, dinner parties, vineyards, deserts, nations. For example, Walker’s own experience as the mother of a micropreemie (a baby born weighing less than one pound, twelve ounces,[…]

Of the Contract

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Published: 07/11/2017

Of the Contract is a version of a text that is as old as any memory, or a form of legal instrument that constitutes the basis of the world in which its terms have been translated. The text remains as open to renewal as that world remains to future alteration, and the terms are both[…]

Elemental Disappearances

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Published: 11/28/2016

The marauder’s fragment … positions itself in the prism between futility, annihilation, and playful diversion. And still, it is here that we find the last chance for a world. The things sought after here are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the[…]

Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences

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Published: 12/19/2016

What an absolutely brilliant idea for a book. I wish I’d had it and feel full of envy that I didn’t. These compulsively readable messages are part of the pathetic and poignant pornography of our time. ~ Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences is a collection[…]

To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased

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Published: 06/17/2016

To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased is an expanding deconstruction of Hamlet’s famous existential question, achieved by putting the line through paraphrasing software 50 times. With each permutation, the quotation grows longer and its meaning is distorted, causing the question to question its own existence by acting as a faulty self-replicator, a nonsensical self-affirmation that[…]

Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume 1

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Published: 06/17/2016

This volume brings together writing and imagery from the experimental “beachwalk” session(s) at the Third Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World. We began with conversations about the sea. We meditated together on chance, discovery, agency, beauty, and[…]