Utopia Pipe Dream Memory

by Anna Gurton-Wachter

Poetry. Women's Studies. UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY builds upon impossible imagined intimacies, relishing the pleasure of slow, attentive learning. In an unfolding of rhythms, repetitions, and distended narratives it envisions a space of play and ecstatic influence, drawing characters such as Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer and Maya Deren into dialogues and visions that articulate the tension between embodiment and voice, identification and materiality. These narratives push towards a unified dispersal, a complex act of exultant feminine chaos, letting slip the boundaries between what is animal, what is describable, and what can be made to appear.

"UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY is a plethora of wonder and exuberance. Anna Gurton-Wachter, 'in her woman treasure form, ' has conjured a lush and evocative new wave of feminist thinking where subject and object are erotic enablers and the spell cast by narration is our ecological surround redoubled, brimming with potent and unbounded fascination. She rethinks from inside the juggernaut what a sociology of the imagination can look like. I adore the perverse transparency of mesmerizing similitudes and divergences that tug at each other, at perception and at the reader's third eye, fixated on desire's embodied visions. Anna's capacity for a theatrics of iconoclastic reverie is in a league of its own."--Brenda Iijima

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2019

About the author

Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist.

Recent work has appeared in Hot Pink, The Brooklyn Rail, The Recluse, Ginger Zine, Social Text, Deluge and Vestiges. Her full length poetry collection Utopia Pipe Dream Memory was published in December 2019 by Ugly Duckling Presse: https://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/ca... Another full length book, Empire K Hole, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2028.

For many years Anna made chapbooks with DoubleCross Press and was a host of a the Segue Reading Series.

She is based out of Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have such an affinity for this writing

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent surrealism remixed 100 oneiric years on.

For some reason all of the corpse flowers are blooming at once. When this happens, what else is there to digest?

you against you on the language-death axis.

[Alex Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was as much an exercise in hard reading comprehension skills as it was in trusting my subconscious to capture meanings conjured as they passed by. The experience I had was rooted in questioning the value/necessity of art in the crumbling of our shared reality against the human drive to create art, but I will read this again and try out new ways to crack some more meaning out of this one since there seems to be so much here to find.

[Brainard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just gorgeous, unique, puzzling and magnetic. Even the final credits I had to read twice. Truly.

[Alexis F. Almeida · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant poems that stayed and stay with me for a long time :)

[Arwen-Vira Marsh · Rating 1 out of 5]

either this book made no sense or i’m dumb