The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Winter 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[…]

Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures

Published: 12/30/2019

We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise, and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else. We’re still here — there differently than those before us, but[…]

The Bodies That Remain

Imprint:

Published: 10/16/2018

The Bodies That Remain is a collection of bodies and absences. Through biography, experimental essay, interview, fictional manifestation, and poetic extraction, The Bodies That Remain is a collection of texts and images on the bodies of artists and writers who battled with the frustration of their own physicality and whose work reckoned with these limitations[…]

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[…]

Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing

Imprint:

Published: 12/24/2012

Ostranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by[…]

Writing Death

Imprint:

Published: 06/06/2011

Writing Death opens a meditation on the possibility of mourning; of whether there is a subject, or even object, that one mourns—of whether one is mourning, can only mourn, the very impossibility of mourning itself. The manuscript is framed by two attempts at mourning—Avital Ronell’s “The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout” and Jeremy Fernando’s “adieu.” In-between—for[…]