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You closed your eyes, and tuned into the warm impermanence of things organic. You were suddenly snatched away and propelled elsewhere. In this elsewhere, you felt as if you were orbiting around me in a space capsule and you distinctly heard my strange and eerie wail. You were bewildered to see millions of fragments from dumped satellites and rockets, orbiting the earth, promising collisions with new ones, spelling out trouble ahead. Amongst the space junk, you recognised orbiting past a flying aeroplane door, an astronaut’s glove, an ejector seat.
Susana Medina‘s contribution to Letters to the Earth, read at the Extinction Rebellion protests in London.
Desire is described viscerally, but without eroticism or titillation. The prevailing tone is of ambivalence or boredom, even as sexual interactions devolve into violence and abuse. There are frequent reminders of the aftermath of her trysts, the bruises, aches, and scratches, as well as of Adèle’s having asked for them. Her appetites seem rooted less in the thrill of duplicity and deceit than in a desire for brutality and domination in their pure form.
Rebecca Rosenberg reviews Leïla Slimani’s’s Adèle.
It is an alphabet I made using a Henry Hanson Steel Alphabet Stamp Set.
I tried to catch the character of the letter in each diagram.
In the 63rd edition of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Susan Connolly.
I discovered these images while “reading” newsprint sources using cello tape, thus collecting ink residue in a kind of analog sampling process. Maybe this evidence confirms the unfathomable world hidden behind the clutter of advertising and news reports with their nakedly cynical purposes. I’m always searching for these alternate spaces; I find them reassuring.
In the 62nd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Jeff Bagato.
At which point does a knot become knotted? Can some knots appear unknotted? Computers can make everything seem calculated and worked out, all is well ordered to the algorithmic eye that constantly seeks out the path of least resistance: but to a human it is complete chaos. There is a certain potential in the path of most resistance, where strands come close and rub against each other and the friction creates comforting warmth as you struggle to unfurl it. I wonder what this liminal ‘special Space’ between being simultaneously knotted and unknotted looks like.
By Matthew Turner.
Lundquist’s poems are patient. They allow for the natural trajectory of events. In the way that spring waits for winter to pass or water waits for clouds to become rain drops. His poems leave organic chronology free to do its thing. He observes, he does not disturb or disrupt the secret logic of things.
Mersiha Bruncevic reviews After Mozart (Heroin on Fifth Street) by Robert Lindquist.
From where did this belief, this faith in me, stem? This is what I think secretly infuriated Claire, though she herself believed just the same as they did about me. Perhaps it came down to the sheer confidence of my line, which was irrefutable; or the speed with which I’d absorbed my lessons in methods and materials, in draftsmanship especially, and later in painting. Actually, these kinds of measures were useless in gauging an artist’s deeper gifts, but then, these were academic artists surrounding me. What could you expect of them?
The conclusion of chapter one from Mark de Silva‘s new novel, The Logos.
‘[N]othing could be taken unless something somewhere else was also given in exchange’, thought ‘Not yet he’ while mourning over her husband’s corpse, in one allusion to the novel’s title. This particular give (or make) and take is a process of creation to which destruction is inherent. Perhaps it’s inherent to all creation; it often is to making art—tearing down, throwing out, breaking boundaries—and it certainly is to making Abe Kunstler. He himself becomes an unquestionably destructive force, undone not only by the artifice he creates but by the fallacy he believes. One effect of that fallacy is that he never sees himself as undone; where we see destruction, he sees creation. This is a different kind of Künstlerroman.
Lee Gillette reviews Trenton Makes by Tadzio Koelb.
The prismatic character of our times is such that all works of art might have something to say about it, some sliver of reflection caught in the shattered mirror, even if unwittingly or unintentional. When the overarching theme of this of not-so-fun house-of-mirrors is the perception of perception, then everything is a clue—every chance encounter, every uttered phrase, every fragment is an artifact, a symbol of a symbol of a symbol in the infinite regress of what is really going on. What dark forces are determining this? In what corrupt reality are we in fact living? Corrupt like a file. The copy of the file. The copy of the copy of the copy. Corrupted perhaps by the degenerating consequences of the replication itself – otherwise we must assign blame, mustn’t we? And where does that get us these days?
By Jeff Wood.
The acronyms in the images (paintings) I sent you are all of organisations that have some form of control over us: Property companies (Estate), state surveillance (Look Out), government ministries (Office) and big banks (Bank).
In the 61st edition of The Poem Brut series, new poetry by Tony Rickaby.