Paperback / softback | |
March 13, 1996 | |
9780819562951 | |
English | |
103 | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
.3 Pounds (US) | |
$15.95 USD, £12.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Electronic book text | |
January 1, 2012 | |
9780819572615 | |
English | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
$12.99 USD, £9.95 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
The Front Matter, Dead Souls
Leslie Scalapino is widely regarded as one of the best avant-garde writers in America today. This extraordinary new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, "a serial novel for publication in the newspaper" that collapses the distinction between documentary and fiction. Loosely set in Los Angeles, the book scrutinizes our image-making, producing extreme and vivid images-hyena, Muscle Beach in Venice, the Supreme Court, subway rides-in order for them to be real. Countering contemporary trends toward interiority, Scalapino's work constitutes a unique effort to "be" objectively in the world. The writing is an action, a dynamic push to make intimacy in the public realm. She does not distinguish between poetry and "real events": her writing is analogous to Buddhist notions of dreaming one is a butterfly, and becoming aware that actually being the butterfly is as real as dreaming it.
About the Author
LESLIE SCALAPINO is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays, as well as the novel Dafoe (Sun and Moon,1994). Among her books of poetry are way (1988), that they were at the beach- aeolotropic series (1985), and Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), all published by North Point Press. Leslie Scalapino has taught most recently at Bard College and the Naropa Institute.
Reviews
"Challenging, bizarre, and, surprisingly, engaging language-, image-, and action-play. Scalapino caputures the flux and motion that is late-twentieth-century living, and she does so with freshness, daring, and subtle skillfulness."—Booklist
"Leslie Scalapino's undulating phrasal rhythms are in turn psychedelic, analytic, notational, pointillistic, and narrational. Like a sumo wrestler doing contact improvisation with a ballerina, Scalapino balances the unbalanceable poetic accounts of social justice and aesthetic insistence."—Charles Bernstein
Endorsements
"Leslie Scalapino's undulating phrasal rhythms are in turn psychedelic, analytic, notational, pointillistic, and narrational. Like a sumo wrestler doing contact improvisation with a ballerina, Scalapino balances the unbalanceable poetic accounts of social justice and aesthetic insistence."
—Charles Bernstein
"Only a very few poets or writers of any disposition have such a formal enterprise as is here evident. In that sense one might qualify this work as being both the concept and demonstration in a way that would be akin to aspects of contemporary philosophy, or the most forward of international poetriesThe formal brilliance of the construction is altogether dazzling. How Leslie Scalapino manages to make a 'virtual reality' in which reality itself becomes the determinant is an absolute wonder to me."—Robert Creeley
—Charles Bernstein
"Only a very few poets or writers of any disposition have such a formal enterprise as is here evident. In that sense one might qualify this work as being both the concept and demonstration in a way that would be akin to aspects of contemporary philosophy, or the most forward of international poetriesThe formal brilliance of the construction is altogether dazzling. How Leslie Scalapino manages to make a 'virtual reality' in which reality itself becomes the determinant is an absolute wonder to me."—Robert Creeley
Paperback / softback | |
March 13, 1996 | |
9780819562951 | |
English | |
103 | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
.3 Pounds (US) | |
$15.95 USD, £12.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Electronic book text | |
January 1, 2012 | |
9780819572615 | |
English | |
8.50 Inches (US) | |
5.50 Inches (US) | |
$12.99 USD, £9.95 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles by Leslie Scalapino
The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence
Leslie Scalapino
Jan 2012
- Wesleyan University Press
$17.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$13.99 USD
- Electronic book text
Zither & Autobiography
Leslie Scalapino
May 2003
- Wesleyan University Press
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
Other Titles from Wesleyan Poetry Series
Asked What Has Changed
Ed Roberson
Jan 2023
- Wesleyan University Press
$24.95 USD
- Hardback
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
Be Brave to Things
Jack Spicer, edited by Daniel Katz
Oct 2021
- Wesleyan University Press
$35.00 USD
- Hardback
The Past
Wendy Xu
Sep 2021
- Wesleyan University Press
$15.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$25.00 USD
- Hardback
Other Titles in POETRY / General
BAX 2020
Seth Abramson, Jesse Damiani, edited by Carmen Maria Machado, Joyelle McSweeney
Dec 2020
- Wesleyan University Press
$19.95 USD
- Paperback / softback
$15.99 USD
- Electronic book text