Darkness

by Yedda Morrison

Poetry. "Yedda Morrison has produced an edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which only references to the natural world remain. But what counts as 'natural' is far from self-evident, and Morrison's erasures open onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions.... If the test of conceptual writing is the degree to which the distance between the concept and the execution creates enough friction to generate a spark across that gap, here, the ethereous space between the idea and the text—between mind and body, artifice and nature, erasure and source—ionizes with violent disruption and report."—Craig Dworkin

Genres: Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2012

Reviews

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading this as part of a project on erasure. I have lots to say, but that will be saved for an essay. It's a good model for erasure that creates a conversation between texts but also between ontologies, in this case, between 'civilization' and 'wilderness', making me think of how different cultures and adventurous travel writing position the categories.

[julia]

I need to go back and reread Heart of Darkness if only to appreciate this experiment better because it is a fantastic concept. The overwhelming amount of sea, water, and river being mentioned is something I don't remember from the original book but it makes so much sense. A book with so much to interpret and so few words, astounding.

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of the Heart of Darkness Yedda Morrison weaves a poetic line or two, bits of sunrise, bits of trees and greenery seen through glimpses of windows. This kind of transcendental move levels parts of the novel we know to form its own illegitimate immanence. Not a hard book to read, or long, but interesting in how she picks mood and ambiance through what is otherwise in support of something else. This kind of curating is a mode of what makes postmodernism post-modernism.

[Jonathan May · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. An erasure of the physical presence of colonialism still bears witness to its horrors in the disruption of both land and language.