A/An

by Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez

Using 17th-century court records of the Salem Witch Trials as a sounding board, A/An mines the archives to uncover the power and violence residing within the language of the legal system. As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant. Rather than regarding the witch hunts as historical curiosity or speculating to fill the gaps, A/An considers the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance. In these poems, English becomes foreign to itself, having distorted through time and slipped through the sieve of law, through the inevitable erasures of matter and the ideological erasures of the archive: the gaps marked “[illegible due to fold in paper],” and the silences that remain unmarked. In a poetics of the “[…]”, A/An engages with textual gaps as lacunae. In A/An, poetry and archive wrestle, shattering these legal documents that act as gravestones and spilling the voices caught therein.

43 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2014

About the author

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is a Chilean poet and novelist working at the intersections of text, image, archive, and translation. They are the author of the novel La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas) and the poetry chapbook A/An (End of the Line Press). Their work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Lambda Literary, The Center for Book Arts, TAKT Residency in Berlin, The Frost Place, Studios at MASS MoCA, and MacDowell. They teach creative writing at Clark University in Worcester, MA.

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who is a witch? Is s/he a maligned wo/man, or someone or something beyond categorization? In A/ An, Gutmann-Gonzalez delves into the legal transcripts from the Salem Witch Trials and treatises on witches from the 15th through 16th Century. They reconfigure the words into lyric and needlepoint patterns to interrogate the power dynamics of the witches on trial, the magistrates presiding over the trial, and the “afflicted” accusers. The quirks of legalese and the fluidity and idiosyncrasies of spelling before the English language was standardized as presented by Gutmann-Gonzalez belie deeper, structural misgivings against beings who are perceived to disrupt the status quo in that era, in turn a mirror to our present time.
This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly.

[Aaron Caycedo-Kimura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gutmann-Gonzalez's remarkable, engaging chapbook A/An shows me the potential of poetry. I admire her command of language and her inventiveness in telling a story. Check it out.