Leslie Scalapino; Kiki Smith (illus.)
The Animal Is in the World Like Water in Water, 2010
NY: Granary Books
One of 45 copies, signed by both Scalapino and Smith.
594
Large quarto. (40)pp, accordion-fold. Scalapino composed the poem in response to Smith's drawings, which repeatedly show a woman being eaten animals. Both the images and verses consciously efface affective statements...
Large quarto. (40)pp, accordion-fold. Scalapino composed the poem in response to Smith's drawings, which repeatedly show a woman being eaten animals. Both the images and verses consciously efface affective statements - the woman's face is expressionless, and the shifting syntax of the poetry make its supremely difficult to conjure any emotional response to the language. Instead the book communicates a different sort of experience, one that is almost dream-like in its unfamiliarity. The reader is given the book as a series of textual and visual facts stripped of extraneous sensibility, creating a space in which it becomes paramount to reevaluate the terms of conscious interaction - is the way in which we usually experience the world the way the world actually is? Bound at Daniel Kelm's Wide Awake Garage in blind-embossed suede. Housed in dropback box. Fine.