- Paperback: 100 pages
- Published: 4/1/09
- IBSN: 9781933354767
- Genre: Poetry
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to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length
Young poet Rick Reid enters the pantheon of Chris Abani’s Black Goat poetry series.
What people are saying…
“Rick Reid is one the most startling, exciting, and innovative poets now writing. He is doing nothing less than reimagining and redefining the boundaries of our poetry. The future of poetry starts here.”
—David St. John, author of Prism
“The title of this wonderful first book of poetry suggests a language installation . . . in which strips of language hang from the ceiling in a way that the viewer can only read them by entering their maze, happily lost because intimate with each detail . . . Rick Reid offers us a living as well as a text. The destination recedes as the present moment holds up the glare of its mirror-shard. But the intimations can also be profound . . . the shudder and color of stop-time.”
—Paul Hoover
“Haunting, a composition of austere beauty and experiment . . . Reid’s voice is a true other . . . One reads this debut book with wonder, catching blur and motion of moments unreeling with unexpected turns . . . This work is an excellent flip-book in the best sense that invigorates as it deforms our encounter with words, words that we meet on the road, with mysterious, a near-gasping recognition.”
—Susan McCabe, author of Descartes’ Nightmare and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film
Description
Black Goat is an independent poetry imprint of Akashic Books created and curated by award-winning Nigerian author Chris Abani (author of Becoming Abigail and Song for Night). Black Goat is committed to publishing well-crafted poetry with a focus on experimental or thematically challenging work. The series aims to create a proportional representation of female poets and non-American poets, particularly poets from Africa.
This groundbreaking poetry collection is a work of interval, delay, and retracing—writing of shifts of silence. Each page serves as a kind of frame that superimposes itself temporally, aurally, and visually on the pages that come before and after to produce a process of both afterimage and surfacing. Inspired by the process of painting and over-painting a canvas—the perceptual and image-layering found in processes of superimposition—to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length explores both the creation and decay of memory and perception through phases of sound and space, whereby seeing and writing generate and erase themselves simultaneously.
- Subjects: Poetry
- Tags: Black Goat, Chris Abani, Rick Reid
Book Details
Author
RICK REID is a conceptual artist and writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York, where he is developing a number of works that combine public space, poetics, handwriting, photography, paint, and the body. to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length is his latest book.