Sun Cycle

by Anne Lesley Selcer

Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. Art. Film. Written from inside its own formal conundrum, SUN CYCLE deals with representation, value, power, gender and the aesthetic. Influenced by 80's film theory updated for 24-hour access screen time, it is obsessed with images and is named for the star that makes vision possible. These poems shift deftly from treatise to entreaty, casting form and finance as corollary particulates in the air surrounding art-making. Selcer's work creates a complicated critique of appearance and visuality, "You are carefully surviving what needs to be destroyed. I need you to language otherwise."

"Dear Anne Lesley Selcer, hello from, 'This book looks like reversal. / This book has a beauty that's ruined when it's read.' The misery of dying each day, and each day better seeing through the hallucination of our imagined banquet, your poems do not comfort, better then that they galvanize and embolden. The acceptance of and anger for what we think we know. Thank you. My life differs from before your book because of your book. 'I arise from this accelerated archaeology to spit in knowing's eye.' In the stack of poetry books I keep with me, the ones that I need to remind me to make the conditions of this world tolerable in order to fully transfigure, your book is at the top. It is poets like you who make not being able to do it all alone okay."--CAConrad

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2019

About the author

Anne Lesley Selcer is author of Sun Cycle, Blank Sign Book, and From a Book of Poems on Beauty. They write widely for museums, galleries, and art publications, and create art in collaboration with artists and individually. Limited edition publications Banlieusard and Untitled (a Treatise on Form) were commissioned for art spaces. Recently off page works include Girl is Presence, The Mouth is Still a Wild Door and The Dread Path of Fire. Their works have screened in festivals and museums in Russia, Germany, Brazil, the UK and the US.

Reviews

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really riveting collection of poems here lends an expert's touch to the extension and retraction of vulnerability. Selcer has a knack for some of the most memorable lines I've read in months. Beyond that, the poems bring solace to an otherwise precedented grief.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seemed very familiar, but then I realized some of it was from her amazing chapbook that won the 2014 Gazing Grain award, and that I published one of these when I was a guest editor for Dusie!

[soap]

I think maybe I just don’t like modern poetry very much possibly.

[Dure Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

so hypertextual and rich- aware of the world and reconstructs it

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

did this contain trite contrived shit? yeah

i fuck with the concept though

i want to believe it will resonate more as i age

[Gunevati · Rating 3 out of 5]

very talented!! just not my style :)