After You, Dearest Language

by Marisol Limon Martinez

Poetry. AFTER YOU, DEAREST LANGUAGE is an alphabetical index and linguistic navigation of symbols and their meanings. Conceived as a sort of hypertext in book form, it connects the visual and the verbal through personal narratives of real, surreal, urban, hyper-urban and bucolic spaces. "This linguistic navigation, much like "Barthes" by Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Words", articulates one's (often inarticulate, and yes, mysterious) interior and its relationship to exteriority"--Claudia Milian. "A subtle and beautifully-crafted exploration of a personal language--but clothed in song, clothed in the visionary power of poetry. Language as a method against evil..."--Guillermo Juan Parra. Marisol Limon Martinez is a visual artist. She lives in New York.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of poetry. For some reason, I don't process it the same way I process other kinds of words, though if I can tell myself that it's poetic prose used as a fiction technique, for instance, suddenly doors open and I can read it in a different way. Which probably means that I can actually process poetry fine if I have the right kind of attentional commitment to it.

Then there's Ugly Duckling. The few Ugly Duckling publications I've run across all are designated "poetry, art" on the back, but they're all of a kind of cohesion of intent and overarching formal structure (as opposed to the traditional "collection") that immediately draws me in. (Also the spines apparently fit my search image for books that merit further investigation before all others on any given shelf, sharing something of the paper quality seen in Archipelago and Pushkin printings).

And so this: a kind of endlessly cross-referenced personal dictionary of dreamworlds and recurrent images, building up an irrational but self-consistent oneiric map, layer by layer of flat but mundanely otherworldly narration. Where is this leading? Does it matter? To be read as a kind of divination, jumping to words to investigate the doors they open, or as a kind of hypertext maze of associations, from word to word, back and forth across empty esplanades and shadowed houses. It's basically a dream diary but an ingeniously packaged and strangely fascinating one, spanning lifetimes.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike anything I've ever read. An encyclopedia of dreams. An index of the surreal. What a whirlwind, what a joy.