A Picture-Feeling

by Renee Gladman

Poetry. African American studies. Postulating a new age of iron with these highly wrought lines, Renee Gladman questions how we experience our life and times, what is real and what is fantasy. She combines elements of narrative with an attention towords and letters that reminds us how much her usual practice of fiction is informed by her sense of poetry. Like wrought iron itself these graceful, unpredictable patterns stand out against the stark day. "the vivid/ black /unseeing" Here a landscape is created and taken apart.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Reviews

[Quinn Monette]

vital infrastructure

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

An industrial fever dream of metal and magic. Hypnotizing book-length poem. I needed a proper introduction into the work of Gladman and this felt like the perfect place to begin.

[S P]

from A Picture-Feeling
coming out of a dream whose content escapes me into a space where V is in danger and where lies the knowledge that we are all full of diasporic shapes that have no memory (13)
[...]
as I begin to lose them
the codes, the fakes,
the wrought irons
nameless still nameless
on the eleventh day
and wonder in
this 'extent of a tragic
dream'
as I begin to await
trains once again
leaving the 'feeling attached
to ideas' to the process
—memory—
of having written
codes but not the codes
themselves
and still more (39*)
[...]
who enters

enters the afterthought
of structure (62*)

[seth]

The alienation that is metallic ways of being. No solid ground to stand on but a world of connected routes and unstable destinations. Was tricky 2 read and then all of a sudden just snapped into place once I realized that her attention is more toward the beauty the words gesture towards and not the configured metal. And yet, this and more filtered by the strange (and repetitive space) of dreaming (“diasporic shapes that have no memory” p13). A mundanely confusing journey charged with the intensity of sparse language.

[giuseppe manley]

Very solidly able to construct un-solid, cloud-like structures which nonetheless are able to hold things up, support. Traffics mainly in the realms of sleep, dream, and hypnotic recall.