Poetry
from Clock, Deck, and Movement
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
from The Ones Who Listen (Book One of the Cywanu Trilogy)
By Whit GriffinAPRIL 2023 | Poetry
Whit Griffin is a poet-medium and semi-professional hermit dwelling in Colorado. Author of such nonlinear metaphysical epics as We Who Saw Everything (Cultural Society) and Uncanny Resonance (Book Two, Lunar Chandelier Collective). With visual artist Timothy C. Ely he collaborated on the book Interior Voice / The Great Practice (Granary Books). Along with Eric Baus he is a resident wizard at Common Name Farm, through which he freely gives away visionary elixirs.
from The Nature Book
By Tom ComittaMARCH 2023 | Fiction
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural world—this excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.
Center for Book Arts
By Megan N. LibertyMARCH 2023 | ArTonic
Wandering around the flower district of Manhattan, you may be surprised to see a green flag hanging high above the flowers, signaling the location of the Center for Book Arts (CBA) on the third floor, where it has been located since 1999. As artist and designer Ben Denzer recently wrote to me, “Despite coming and going to CBA all the time, I can never really get over how much of an unexpected gem it is. The fact that this book utopia is hiding on the third floor of a random building on 27th street has always made me look at all NYC buildings as if each might contain delightful secrets inside.”
Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club
By William CorwinNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
In the comprehensive survey exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, Xaviera Simmons explains with brutal clarity the need for real gestures; land acknowledgments without Land Back will not do, and there can be no equality without reparations. As the title calls out, starting book clubs to read the literature of the oppressed without yielding the social and economic capital demanded in those very texts means nothing.
