Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/15/2024
An experimental hybrid work, Cycle of Dreams pairs translation and original poetry. The translations, or adaptations, are of William Langland’s strange and wild fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, a politically radical English and Latin poem written in the wake of plague and divided into a prologue and twenty passūs or steps. Eric Weiskott transposes the action[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 11/21/2024
Burning Diagrams in Anthropology examines the use of diagrams in anthropology to reimagine how we think about, and challenge, intellectual histories. Highlighting the impossibility of escaping what different disciplines and institutions deem to be “past,” the author combines critical analysis of selected diagrams with an expansive, exploratory reimmersion in their aesthetic, ethical, and political potential.[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/19/2024
The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing is about writers navigating the unspeakable through image, sound, and structure. Each chapter focuses on a specific text, exploring the ways that four writers look to visual and auditory materials and metaphors as passageways to understanding and expressing the ineffable qualities of relationships, identity, and[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
FORTHCOMING Winter 2024
Perceptron is a work of experimental poetry and a critical biographical reading of Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his 1957 invention, the Perceptron. The Perceptron was the first widely publicized and used machine learning device and the origin of much contemporary neural network technology. Rosenblatt was a psychologist, a computer engineer, a musician, an amateur astronomer,[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
FORTHCOMING Spring 2024
“Waves washing up against the hull, a bed and a small stove, the deck hatch sealed shut – the vessel is the ultimate dwelling.” How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these question by looking at a mythical classic of French[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/27/2023
“I cover Steinberg with adjectives, which are like vibrations—multiple, rapid—that this lively oeuvre arouses in me.” Roland Barthes’s consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 — is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes’s oeuvre to be[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/19/2023
Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home. ~ Trump Tower advertisement In the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, considerable ink was spilled on the architecture and interior design of the buildings owned and inhabited by Donald J. Trump. In an effort to understand the inner workings of America’s[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/06/2023
Why write? Why ask a reader to give their time and attention to your words? How can writing be more than narcissism and self-aggrandizement? These questions were ones that the writer and naturalist Barry Lopez asked at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the summer of 2000, and they are questions at the heart of[…]