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Drifting Bottles
GUTSLUT PRESS PRESENTS...
DRIFTING BOTTLES, An Original, Hybrid, Multimedia Collection by Arden Hunter
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A combination of erasure poetry, micro fiction, and visual art, Drifting Bottles is more than a queer, contemporary, multimedia hybrid collection: it's a deep, philosophical exploration and the genre is philosophical exploration of the world as it exists both within the author, and outside of them. In Drifting Bottles, Arden Hunter reforms, re-channels, and recirculates everything from the devastated remains of pages devoured by bookworms and plain texts, to timeless vintage, nostalgic aesthetics and technological landscapes unique to 21st century artists and designers. Fused, collaged, and rooted in the increasingly-vital, ever-evolving art of found poetry, Drifting Bottles utilizes the ruins of passing time, earthly matter, and metaphysical spaces to deliver a vibrant experimental narrative transcendent of all capitalistic and otherwise normative expectations.
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“My experience with Arden Hunter’s work is that no matter its form, it inherently invites you to “really admire all the details” and Drifting Bottles is no exception. In addition to erasure poetry that constructs a simmering new narrative from previous works of fiction and other writing, Hunter builds a paper-ephemera universe surrounding the text with a vivid landscape of collaged photographs, magazine clippings, and other snippets. The book calls upon a staggering variety of one-of-a-kind visual elements, from diagrams to nutrition facts to dictionaries, and the care given to their arrangement is apparent in the composition of each page. With the pieces each functioning as their own works of art within the larger structure of the narrative and the sparse but powerful words remaining in the erasures, I am certain I could spend a lifetime with this book and still find new details by which to be delighted. Drifting Bottles represents everything that’s exciting to me about hybrid work: it’s inventive, considered, and extremely immersive, providing the reader with a glimpse into not only the lives of those playing out on the pages, but the everyday materials that inform Hunter’s own perspective as a creator.”
— nat raum, editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and author of
preparatory school for the end of the world
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"Arden Hunter’s VISPO collection, “Drifting Bottles” organizes a radical, beautiful accretion of powerful colliding narrative-motifs. Using “bulletin boards”, Hunter catalogues image-texts juxtaposing desire, anger, alienation, self-perception, death, transformation….
"Precisely entwined floral arrangements, business charts, scientific paraphernalia, strong-man tropes, secretarial pool line-drawings, dictionary lists and Sunday comics (etc.) are cut, drawn-over, re-shaped in heightened emotional schematics. Faded and vivid colors, redacted texts and erasures, hand-written notes, jarring associations, fractured and bold, create a whole, alternately troubling, and deeply magical, alchemical. The work’s subversive gestures accumulate revelatory arcs of patriarchal refusal, wondrously rhythmic. Performatively aware, Arden Hunter is sharing with the reader dynamic(s) of form/process mechanisms and preoccupations, opening the interrogative of visual poetry’s creative obsessions, producing new-necessary tectonic shifts."
— Robert Frede Kenter, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions, 2021), Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Ice Floe Press
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Arden Hunter is an aroace agender writer, artist and performer. With an eclectic range of interests from the horrific to the whimsical, the theme tying all of their work together is an inexplicable and unconditional love for the ridiculous beast that is called "human." Find them on Twitter @hunterarden
DRIFTING BOTTLES, An Original, Hybrid, Multimedia Collection by Arden Hunter
__
A combination of erasure poetry, micro fiction, and visual art, Drifting Bottles is more than a queer, contemporary, multimedia hybrid collection: it's a deep, philosophical exploration and the genre is philosophical exploration of the world as it exists both within the author, and outside of them. In Drifting Bottles, Arden Hunter reforms, re-channels, and recirculates everything from the devastated remains of pages devoured by bookworms and plain texts, to timeless vintage, nostalgic aesthetics and technological landscapes unique to 21st century artists and designers. Fused, collaged, and rooted in the increasingly-vital, ever-evolving art of found poetry, Drifting Bottles utilizes the ruins of passing time, earthly matter, and metaphysical spaces to deliver a vibrant experimental narrative transcendent of all capitalistic and otherwise normative expectations.
--
“My experience with Arden Hunter’s work is that no matter its form, it inherently invites you to “really admire all the details” and Drifting Bottles is no exception. In addition to erasure poetry that constructs a simmering new narrative from previous works of fiction and other writing, Hunter builds a paper-ephemera universe surrounding the text with a vivid landscape of collaged photographs, magazine clippings, and other snippets. The book calls upon a staggering variety of one-of-a-kind visual elements, from diagrams to nutrition facts to dictionaries, and the care given to their arrangement is apparent in the composition of each page. With the pieces each functioning as their own works of art within the larger structure of the narrative and the sparse but powerful words remaining in the erasures, I am certain I could spend a lifetime with this book and still find new details by which to be delighted. Drifting Bottles represents everything that’s exciting to me about hybrid work: it’s inventive, considered, and extremely immersive, providing the reader with a glimpse into not only the lives of those playing out on the pages, but the everyday materials that inform Hunter’s own perspective as a creator.”
— nat raum, editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and author of
preparatory school for the end of the world
--
"Arden Hunter’s VISPO collection, “Drifting Bottles” organizes a radical, beautiful accretion of powerful colliding narrative-motifs. Using “bulletin boards”, Hunter catalogues image-texts juxtaposing desire, anger, alienation, self-perception, death, transformation….
"Precisely entwined floral arrangements, business charts, scientific paraphernalia, strong-man tropes, secretarial pool line-drawings, dictionary lists and Sunday comics (etc.) are cut, drawn-over, re-shaped in heightened emotional schematics. Faded and vivid colors, redacted texts and erasures, hand-written notes, jarring associations, fractured and bold, create a whole, alternately troubling, and deeply magical, alchemical. The work’s subversive gestures accumulate revelatory arcs of patriarchal refusal, wondrously rhythmic. Performatively aware, Arden Hunter is sharing with the reader dynamic(s) of form/process mechanisms and preoccupations, opening the interrogative of visual poetry’s creative obsessions, producing new-necessary tectonic shifts."
— Robert Frede Kenter, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions, 2021), Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Ice Floe Press
--
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Arden Hunter is an aroace agender writer, artist and performer. With an eclectic range of interests from the horrific to the whimsical, the theme tying all of their work together is an inexplicable and unconditional love for the ridiculous beast that is called "human." Find them on Twitter @hunterarden
- GenresPoetry
36 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 2022
7 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 2, 2023
I loved how this hybrid work made of visual material, erasure poems, and added text came together into what felt like a found narrative, but one looking for meaning and asking questions. Visually it was beautiful and really drew me in and the style of the erasure poems in both content and aesthetics felt really fresh to me.
July 9, 2023
I knew from the moment I saw the title page that I would dig the shit out of this book. The transformative nature of collage and erasure/black-out poetry is something I’ve always found super exciting. It allows for unique pacing and strange lines (which I’m a fan of.)
In Drifting Bottles, there are two forms of narration, erasure poetry and handwritten notes. It felt like coming across someone else’s copy of a book and piecing together a mystery from there. Especially with how the stuff in the blue pen interacts with the highlighted words.
It reminded me of how the House of Leaves messes around with its pages and layers of narrative. I loved how Drifting Bottles warns the reader to read carefully and look at everything. It encourages the reader to treat each page like a piece of a puzzle.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading this (although admittingly the cursive the pen was written in gave me a bit of a headache to read.) I’ve read through the book twice and feel as though it rewards multiple readings.
In Drifting Bottles, there are two forms of narration, erasure poetry and handwritten notes. It felt like coming across someone else’s copy of a book and piecing together a mystery from there. Especially with how the stuff in the blue pen interacts with the highlighted words.
It reminded me of how the House of Leaves messes around with its pages and layers of narrative. I loved how Drifting Bottles warns the reader to read carefully and look at everything. It encourages the reader to treat each page like a piece of a puzzle.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading this (although admittingly the cursive the pen was written in gave me a bit of a headache to read.) I’ve read through the book twice and feel as though it rewards multiple readings.
April 4, 2022
My experience with Arden Hunter’s work is that no matter its form, it inherently invites you to “really admire all the details” and Drifting Bottles is no exception. In addition to erasure poetry that constructs a simmering new narrative from previous works of fiction and other writing, Hunter builds a paper-ephemera universe surrounding the text with a vivid landscape of collaged photographs, magazine clippings, and other snippets. The book calls upon a staggering variety of one-of-a-kind visual elements, from diagrams to nutrition facts to dictionaries, and the care given to their arrangement is apparent in the composition of each page. With the pieces each functioning as their own works of art within the larger structure of the narrative and the sparse but powerful words remaining in the erasures, I am certain I could spend a lifetime with this book and still find new details by which to be delighted. Drifting Bottles represents everything that’s exciting to me about hybrid work: it’s inventive, considered, and extremely immersive, providing the reader with a glimpse into not only the lives of those playing out on the pages, but the everyday materials that inform Hunter’s own perspective as a creator.
February 25, 2022
Arden Hunter’s Drifting Bottles is yet another stunning demonstration of their innovative grasp on visual poetics, philosophy, and the ways they tie into alternate dimensions already existing within our own. Each page is rich with meticulous detail — a different experience each time you peruse or else delve deep into the pages. There is a stillness, but there is also movement (a “drifting”). Which you find solace in shifts with each read, but offers various avenues through which the book can be explored.
Drifting Bottles continues the trend of Hunter’s remarkable 2022 releases, all of which remain breathtaking in Hunter’s unmistakable signature creative style. Still, they never so much as toe the line towards redundancy between works. Drifting Bottles is both unique in its content, approach, and delivery while also existing as an essential part of the Hunter book collection — a one-of-a-kind exploration that both stands alone and provides another segment in the journey that consists of Hunter’s published creative ventures thus far.
Drifting Bottles continues the trend of Hunter’s remarkable 2022 releases, all of which remain breathtaking in Hunter’s unmistakable signature creative style. Still, they never so much as toe the line towards redundancy between works. Drifting Bottles is both unique in its content, approach, and delivery while also existing as an essential part of the Hunter book collection — a one-of-a-kind exploration that both stands alone and provides another segment in the journey that consists of Hunter’s published creative ventures thus far.
March 14, 2023
Arden Hunter is truly a master of so many forms of art and this collection is a testament to that. Drifting Bottles is at once a collage, poetry, art and a story, but really so much more. The collection offers many interpretations and layers upon second and third readings and is something you'll find yourself going back to time and again. This is really one you don't want to miss.
July 9, 2023
This was a poignant perspective, filled with beautiful imagery, captivating poetics, and copious intricate detail.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews