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Lost and
Ever since he was a child sitting in the back of his parents' car, Jeff Griffin has been taking explorative journeys into the desert. In 2007, as an art student, he started wandering the back roads of the Mojave Desert with the purpose of looking for a place to reflect in the harshly beautiful surroundings. What he found were widely scattered postmodern ruins—abandoned trailers and campers and improvised structures—whose vanished occupants had left behind, in their trash, an archaeological record of astonishing richness and poignancy.
Lost and is both a chronicle of Griffin’s obsessive journeying and a portal into a world of dispossessed people and enduring desires. Comprised entirely of unaltered reproductions of extraordinary found materials—drawings, charts, questionnaires, compulsively detailed letters, legal documents, jottings, journal entries, stunningly vivid and mysterious photographs—this is a work of sociological and literary daring that defies categorization. Part documentary history, part literary adventure, part mystical detective story, Griffin’s immersion in extremity has yielded wrenching annals of the modes and manners in which lost people inscribe their psychic, sexual, religious, and economic yearnings.
At the core of the work is a collection of poems, mostly handwritten and composed without pretense to literary sophistication, that give direct expression to the abiding impulse to tap language’s transformative potential. Assembled with deep regard for the dignity of its collective group of anonymous authors, Lost and is a book of profound conceptual originality—an engrossing, shocking, and tender work of art that strives to awaken voices from the wilderness of the inexpressible.
Lost and is both a chronicle of Griffin’s obsessive journeying and a portal into a world of dispossessed people and enduring desires. Comprised entirely of unaltered reproductions of extraordinary found materials—drawings, charts, questionnaires, compulsively detailed letters, legal documents, jottings, journal entries, stunningly vivid and mysterious photographs—this is a work of sociological and literary daring that defies categorization. Part documentary history, part literary adventure, part mystical detective story, Griffin’s immersion in extremity has yielded wrenching annals of the modes and manners in which lost people inscribe their psychic, sexual, religious, and economic yearnings.
At the core of the work is a collection of poems, mostly handwritten and composed without pretense to literary sophistication, that give direct expression to the abiding impulse to tap language’s transformative potential. Assembled with deep regard for the dignity of its collective group of anonymous authors, Lost and is a book of profound conceptual originality—an engrossing, shocking, and tender work of art that strives to awaken voices from the wilderness of the inexpressible.
- GenresPoetry
170 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2013
1 person is currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Griffin
18 books9 followersJeff Griffin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an associate at Griffin Moss Industries, Inc., and he operates the publishing house Slim Princess Holdings. He lives around Nevada.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 28, 2013
“Lost and” by Jeff Griffin at first wasn't what I expected at all. I was awaiting some sort of desert/urban decay photography book, images to drool over while I wished myself away there. Instead, what I opened was one of the most unusual photo projects I have ever seen. It reminded me a bit of Courtney Love’s “Dirty Blonde” or the Kurt Cobain journals, except here you had no celebrity. It reminded me of my own old shoebox in which I kept random scribbles, notes secretly exchanged in class with a friend, poetry written badly but from the heart, silly snapshots, old diaries with now cringeworthy entries but written honestly and heartfelt at the time. There was also a hint of similarity to the Postsecret project, but it felt - because it is - raw, because it was not produced with a passive, independent audience in mind.
One thing that struck my eye about it was that Griffin did what I'd love to do but cannot due to geographical distance: disappearing in the Mojave desert for quiet reflection. God I long for the truly silenced and left-alone! No way of finding that in overpopulated Europe!
And then he - damn him!, shouts the green-eyed monster - combined it with another of my beloved pastimes: exploring abandoned, decaying settlements, delving into the back story of each place, picking up artifacts, wondering about the lives of their previous owners who seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth - leaving each place haunted, imprinted by it.
Too much have the rich and famous, the educated, the expensively and extensively trained shaped what we see as culture, ignoring the narratives produced by the average Joe with clumsy but genuine hands, in unglamorous places. But here are the lost and abandoned photographs, snippets of letters, memos, notes, drawings, even poems, by normal people, as the artist found them: dirty, torn, lost in various abandoned places in the Nevada and California desert. They show the mundane, naive, unpolished, which makes them all the more enchanting, making you wonder about the back stories of each item - somehow little shreds and snippets, and random little photographs say more about a person and their life than a carefully written diary or an artfully curated photo book. They weren't meant to be seen by the world and thus are more honest and real artifacts of culture than what we’re usually being presented.Skill is not necessarily an indicator of art, at least not to me; art derives from the genuinely felt and expressed, reflecting a slice of someone’s unique reality or imagination - which is a reality in itself. An original and wonderful book!
One thing that struck my eye about it was that Griffin did what I'd love to do but cannot due to geographical distance: disappearing in the Mojave desert for quiet reflection. God I long for the truly silenced and left-alone! No way of finding that in overpopulated Europe!
And then he - damn him!, shouts the green-eyed monster - combined it with another of my beloved pastimes: exploring abandoned, decaying settlements, delving into the back story of each place, picking up artifacts, wondering about the lives of their previous owners who seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth - leaving each place haunted, imprinted by it.
Too much have the rich and famous, the educated, the expensively and extensively trained shaped what we see as culture, ignoring the narratives produced by the average Joe with clumsy but genuine hands, in unglamorous places. But here are the lost and abandoned photographs, snippets of letters, memos, notes, drawings, even poems, by normal people, as the artist found them: dirty, torn, lost in various abandoned places in the Nevada and California desert. They show the mundane, naive, unpolished, which makes them all the more enchanting, making you wonder about the back stories of each item - somehow little shreds and snippets, and random little photographs say more about a person and their life than a carefully written diary or an artfully curated photo book. They weren't meant to be seen by the world and thus are more honest and real artifacts of culture than what we’re usually being presented.Skill is not necessarily an indicator of art, at least not to me; art derives from the genuinely felt and expressed, reflecting a slice of someone’s unique reality or imagination - which is a reality in itself. An original and wonderful book!
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March 17, 2024I got this book free through NetGalley, and I read it quickly on the train yesterday. Griffen is a poet and has arranged a collection of photographs, letters, poems and other texts (to use the word as broadly as possible) that he found in the desert in the US. It is an intriguing collection, and some of the finds are incredible - I don't know how long he took to compile this extraordinary set of texts.
I enjoyed the book, but I don't think that it will stay with me very long. I have enjoyed other similar endeavours, such as Found Magazine and others. Whilst this is a more curated book than that magazine and other similar endeavours, I would have liked to hear more of Griffen's voice - but he clearly has a good eye for the deeply human, so I will keep following what he puts out.
More info on the book is here:
http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2013-...
I enjoyed the book, but I don't think that it will stay with me very long. I have enjoyed other similar endeavours, such as Found Magazine and others. Whilst this is a more curated book than that magazine and other similar endeavours, I would have liked to hear more of Griffen's voice - but he clearly has a good eye for the deeply human, so I will keep following what he puts out.
More info on the book is here:
http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2013-...
July 9, 2014
This collection is made up entirely of found photos, letters, and documents. Discarded or lost memories…deserted in the Mojave Desert. It is definitely a strange little book. A curated ethnography of sorts, and yet somehow a bit disconcerting.
I received the book through NetGalley. When a book continues to come to mind, I always think it a good thing. Somehow it has challenged or impacted or introduced something new to me. This is the case with this book…and strangely, I am still not sure what I want to say in this review. Give it a try. It's definitely a different type of book. Or maybe just different for me.
I received the book through NetGalley. When a book continues to come to mind, I always think it a good thing. Somehow it has challenged or impacted or introduced something new to me. This is the case with this book…and strangely, I am still not sure what I want to say in this review. Give it a try. It's definitely a different type of book. Or maybe just different for me.
October 8, 2020
Lost and by Jeff Griffin is a collection of discarded memories. Griffin operates the Slim Princess Holdings, a publishing house and is an associate at Griffin Moss Industries. He graduated from Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently lives in Nevada.
Life is filled with strange coincidences. Earlier today I wrote a review on a poetry collection by a bartender who apparently had no educational background in poetry and I made the comment of not knowing what to expect: something good or an experimental project. It turned out to be pretty traditional. From Griffin, I was expecting something traditional with a Southwest theme. Instead I got the experimental poetry. Poetry is a bit of a stretch, but maybe something poetic would be a better description. I read this collection twice hoping to come up with at Ah-ha moment when everything miraculously made sense...the Rosetta Stone for this book. That moment didn't come.
I discarded the idea that this was some how poetry and things made a bit more sense...kind of. There is something in here that captures the reader and holds him or her to this book. The book is mostly comprised of letters, drawing, documents, partial book pages, charts, and photographs. These items were discarded by their owners and found by the Griffin, in the desert, who organized them into a book. It is the work or items of many people that make up this book. It would be like buying a public use computer and scouring the hard drive for information in the form of emails, Tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook postings of all the users and reading that information. There is a certain feeling of guilt while reading that you are digging into peoples' private lives. Some of the items are generic but others are very personal. It is interesting and maybe even compelling in a non-traditional sense.
I am still unsure of what exactly to make of Lost and but it was well worth the read and the reread. It has a voyeuristic element to it, but at the same time you also think, there can't be anything wrong with it because it is all random items found blowing around the desert. Lost and is a book on the surface that has little to it other than a collection of discarded paper, but where the book succeeds is below the surface. The more you think about what you have in your hand the greater its value becomes. Most of the letters and notes are handwritten, and for the last decade, or more, how many people have written letters by hand? And when people do write letters by hand it is something important to them – to create a permanent record of their thoughts rather than an electronic message that has no permanent form. These are little bits of people’s lives that they deemed necessary to create a permanent form either as writing or as a photograph.
I was worried that I wouldn't have much to say about Lost and, but apparently I was wrong; I could probably keep going for a while. This work is will grow on you, more so after you have read it and thought it though. I would be lying if I said I was not disappointed when I first started the book. I am, however, very glad I stuck with it. It is a fairly amazing experiment.
Life is filled with strange coincidences. Earlier today I wrote a review on a poetry collection by a bartender who apparently had no educational background in poetry and I made the comment of not knowing what to expect: something good or an experimental project. It turned out to be pretty traditional. From Griffin, I was expecting something traditional with a Southwest theme. Instead I got the experimental poetry. Poetry is a bit of a stretch, but maybe something poetic would be a better description. I read this collection twice hoping to come up with at Ah-ha moment when everything miraculously made sense...the Rosetta Stone for this book. That moment didn't come.
I discarded the idea that this was some how poetry and things made a bit more sense...kind of. There is something in here that captures the reader and holds him or her to this book. The book is mostly comprised of letters, drawing, documents, partial book pages, charts, and photographs. These items were discarded by their owners and found by the Griffin, in the desert, who organized them into a book. It is the work or items of many people that make up this book. It would be like buying a public use computer and scouring the hard drive for information in the form of emails, Tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook postings of all the users and reading that information. There is a certain feeling of guilt while reading that you are digging into peoples' private lives. Some of the items are generic but others are very personal. It is interesting and maybe even compelling in a non-traditional sense.
I am still unsure of what exactly to make of Lost and but it was well worth the read and the reread. It has a voyeuristic element to it, but at the same time you also think, there can't be anything wrong with it because it is all random items found blowing around the desert. Lost and is a book on the surface that has little to it other than a collection of discarded paper, but where the book succeeds is below the surface. The more you think about what you have in your hand the greater its value becomes. Most of the letters and notes are handwritten, and for the last decade, or more, how many people have written letters by hand? And when people do write letters by hand it is something important to them – to create a permanent record of their thoughts rather than an electronic message that has no permanent form. These are little bits of people’s lives that they deemed necessary to create a permanent form either as writing or as a photograph.
I was worried that I wouldn't have much to say about Lost and, but apparently I was wrong; I could probably keep going for a while. This work is will grow on you, more so after you have read it and thought it though. I would be lying if I said I was not disappointed when I first started the book. I am, however, very glad I stuck with it. It is a fairly amazing experiment.
July 21, 2016
This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 4.0/5
Quite recently I reviewed a book of poetry that I didn't much enjoy. I'd prefer not to mention it by name as it doesn't need any sort of promotion (even bad publicity). But what that book thought it was (according to the author), this book is. And that is: Poetry of a most unusual sort, out of the ordinary ... extra-ordinary.
Jeff Griffin hasn't written a book of poetry as much as he has 'collected' a book of poetry by people who haven't realized what they have helped to create. Griffin has collected scattered papers from abandoned homes and trailers around the desert and selected a few to present here. It is moving and whimsical and a masterful method of identifying what it means to be 'man.'
Right from the start, I was hooked with "a budgie's linguistic development." What a great assortment of words and meanings! Once hooked, I didn't want to finish the book and read through it in one, patient sitting. It was a voyeuristic feeling, peeking in on the private writings of those not intending to be published. The twenty pages of letters and notes to and from Est'ee and Tony, detailing their love and fear and physical abuse, were mesmerizing and ended with the simple drawing "How to set a table" that was itself tremendously powerful and lonely.
The inclusion of well-selected photographs is beautiful. The images of a construction site, taken from indoors with ghostly reflections of the photographer is a haunted moment of time, frozen in the faded colors of a cheap print.
The title itself, Lost and, suggests something that isn't finished, which is a perfect metaphor for what Griffin has done. There will continue to be people picking up and leaving pieces of themselves behind, as long as there will always be greener pastures or the possibilities of a better life somewhere else. And the struggles that mankind faces, those of Tony and Est'ee and all those others represented here, are eternal struggles that aren't likely to have an end, until man himself is finished.
Looking for a good book? This poetic collection, Lost and, by Jeff Griffin, is a beautiful assortment of 'found' poetry and philosophy.
Quite recently I reviewed a book of poetry that I didn't much enjoy. I'd prefer not to mention it by name as it doesn't need any sort of promotion (even bad publicity). But what that book thought it was (according to the author), this book is. And that is: Poetry of a most unusual sort, out of the ordinary ... extra-ordinary.
Jeff Griffin hasn't written a book of poetry as much as he has 'collected' a book of poetry by people who haven't realized what they have helped to create. Griffin has collected scattered papers from abandoned homes and trailers around the desert and selected a few to present here. It is moving and whimsical and a masterful method of identifying what it means to be 'man.'
Right from the start, I was hooked with "a budgie's linguistic development." What a great assortment of words and meanings! Once hooked, I didn't want to finish the book and read through it in one, patient sitting. It was a voyeuristic feeling, peeking in on the private writings of those not intending to be published. The twenty pages of letters and notes to and from Est'ee and Tony, detailing their love and fear and physical abuse, were mesmerizing and ended with the simple drawing "How to set a table" that was itself tremendously powerful and lonely.
The inclusion of well-selected photographs is beautiful. The images of a construction site, taken from indoors with ghostly reflections of the photographer is a haunted moment of time, frozen in the faded colors of a cheap print.
The title itself, Lost and, suggests something that isn't finished, which is a perfect metaphor for what Griffin has done. There will continue to be people picking up and leaving pieces of themselves behind, as long as there will always be greener pastures or the possibilities of a better life somewhere else. And the struggles that mankind faces, those of Tony and Est'ee and all those others represented here, are eternal struggles that aren't likely to have an end, until man himself is finished.
Looking for a good book? This poetic collection, Lost and, by Jeff Griffin, is a beautiful assortment of 'found' poetry and philosophy.
February 5, 2016
Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Arboretum Library of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden on August 5, 2015.
January 22, 2015
Ok, I'm going to admit it, most of the time I just don't "get" modern art- and this book to me is more modern art than anything else. It's a collection of found objects- some photos, scraps of paper, letters, etc. It pretty much feels like you are going through someone else's trash and coming across scraps of meaningless information. Some of the things might be interesting if they are yours and you are looking back on them in a nostalgic way, but I have no interest in looking through someone else's discarded junk.
But if you are someone who goes to a modern art exhibit and can find deep meaning in a pile of candy wrappers or a ball of yarn, then this will be right up your alley.
But if you are someone who goes to a modern art exhibit and can find deep meaning in a pile of candy wrappers or a ball of yarn, then this will be right up your alley.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews