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book alter
- GenresPoetry
41 pages, ebook
First published May 13, 2009
20 people want to read
About the author
David Wolach
8 books22 followersProfessor of Text Arts, Poetry & Poetics, Aesthetics and New Media, The Evergreen State College. Visiting Professor, Workshop In Language & Thinking, Bard College. Editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press.
Union organizer and AFL-CIO consultant, UAW 2000-2007.
Books forthcoming:
--Acts of Art/Works of Violence (SSLA/USydney, 2010)
--Hospitalogy (chapbook, Scantily Clad Press, 2010)
--The Cutting Room (chapbook, Differentia Press, 2010)
Books:
--Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010)
--Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox Books, 2010)
--book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009)
--Fractions of M (chapbook, Trainwreck Press, 2008)
Books Recently Edited:
--PRESS: Activism & the Avant-Garde (Wheelhouse Press, 2009)
--Consensualism In Principle, Raul Kumar (Blackwell, 2008)
Union organizer and AFL-CIO consultant, UAW 2000-2007.
Books forthcoming:
--Acts of Art/Works of Violence (SSLA/USydney, 2010)
--Hospitalogy (chapbook, Scantily Clad Press, 2010)
--The Cutting Room (chapbook, Differentia Press, 2010)
Books:
--Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010)
--Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox Books, 2010)
--book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009)
--Fractions of M (chapbook, Trainwreck Press, 2008)
Books Recently Edited:
--PRESS: Activism & the Avant-Garde (Wheelhouse Press, 2009)
--Consensualism In Principle, Raul Kumar (Blackwell, 2008)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 11, 2009
“book alter(ed)” is available as a .pdf download from ungovernable press. The cover image “Ash” by Wolach is a palimpsest: a text on drought overlays the image “The Firebombing of Tokyo.” This layering sets the tone for a poetics that “shift(s) from things to shifts that are shifted.”
“Part one” is called riverfire. Each phrase dives through linguistic depths touching the real, touching paradox.
“Water Burns. Often a finger is a vessel punctured as it moves through guarded waters.”
[ :]
“As if driving into, there were not guards for the rails. The bone cries, then marrow. As if our shapes exhausted shape.”
This writing arouses a mixed emotion somewhere between a sensual elusiveness and solid ache. Lyrics clash against the “thingness” of shit and vomit. The drive and power of juxtaposition and the slippage between and across, fire the pituitary gland.
Each page in “part two” is supported by a visual image and contains three collage-like stanzas. Here the frottage continues where for example, “—you settled in the slightest tension” rubs against “—I was not paid.”
Without a doubt this is a sensitive and superbly crafted (chap)book.
“Part one” is called riverfire. Each phrase dives through linguistic depths touching the real, touching paradox.
“Water Burns. Often a finger is a vessel punctured as it moves through guarded waters.”
[ :]
“As if driving into, there were not guards for the rails. The bone cries, then marrow. As if our shapes exhausted shape.”
This writing arouses a mixed emotion somewhere between a sensual elusiveness and solid ache. Lyrics clash against the “thingness” of shit and vomit. The drive and power of juxtaposition and the slippage between and across, fire the pituitary gland.
Each page in “part two” is supported by a visual image and contains three collage-like stanzas. Here the frottage continues where for example, “—you settled in the slightest tension” rubs against “—I was not paid.”
Without a doubt this is a sensitive and superbly crafted (chap)book.
May 16, 2009
The two sections of book alter(ed) reproduced here by ungovernable press are startlingly different; the differences reward attention. In the first section, the fire speaks, but this is not T.S. Eliot's epic voice. Anchored both in the material horror of the Tokyo firebombings (depicted on the cover) and in the philosophical problem of the historical events that seem to return to us over and over again, this section plays with the terror of "as if." The work seems to be backing into history, ripping holes in the fabric as it moves in and out of what we think of as our factual experience.
The second section, which draws on excerpts from online pornography, deals far more directly with bodies and their vulnerability (and of course with the book as body). Here Wolach is doing a different kind of inversion, taking language that is firmly anchored in the present (Home Depot, foreclosures, etc.), but shifted slightly out of our normal range of perception, as in lines like this: "His hands ran up the left side of my life." Together the two sections are deeply intimate, but also--and importantly--unsettling.
The second section, which draws on excerpts from online pornography, deals far more directly with bodies and their vulnerability (and of course with the book as body). Here Wolach is doing a different kind of inversion, taking language that is firmly anchored in the present (Home Depot, foreclosures, etc.), but shifted slightly out of our normal range of perception, as in lines like this: "His hands ran up the left side of my life." Together the two sections are deeply intimate, but also--and importantly--unsettling.
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May 17, 2009Excerpt from an email to the author:
Hi David,
I read the first part of book alter(ed). I got, as usual from your writing, or writing I associate with you, the sense of a reaching to/from something beyond and immanent. I would say intimate, but I think the point is that this (something(s)) is so close as to be enmeshed (with...), preintimate, precontemplative. I don't know, maybe I'm projecting--of course I'm projecting--my own mystical sense/raison d'etre, but the context seems to fit.
Anyway, I noted the line, "I am the white that is the appearance of. I am the blank that is the desire of." I thought of whiteness theory, which I am researching, in which whiteness is made the obscured norm by which all else is marked, and is supposed, through a coded system that elides whiteness while enacting it, to be some universal baseline. The line also reminded me of something I read in a upanishad, of the Brahman, a field that is supposed to be universally enmeshed--the source. Anyway, a piece of my response.
Hi David,
I read the first part of book alter(ed). I got, as usual from your writing, or writing I associate with you, the sense of a reaching to/from something beyond and immanent. I would say intimate, but I think the point is that this (something(s)) is so close as to be enmeshed (with...), preintimate, precontemplative. I don't know, maybe I'm projecting--of course I'm projecting--my own mystical sense/raison d'etre, but the context seems to fit.
Anyway, I noted the line, "I am the white that is the appearance of. I am the blank that is the desire of." I thought of whiteness theory, which I am researching, in which whiteness is made the obscured norm by which all else is marked, and is supposed, through a coded system that elides whiteness while enacting it, to be some universal baseline. The line also reminded me of something I read in a upanishad, of the Brahman, a field that is supposed to be universally enmeshed--the source. Anyway, a piece of my response.
May 27, 2009
Wolach’s cathartic poetic/visual genius beguiles and scythes the mind in a way which leaves the reader breathless, coveting the sweetly sour taste of truth; a coarse brine for the palate. Book alter(ed) is a fragmentary glimpse into the very soul of cognitive reflection--a distorted, daunting portrayal of poet as modern day philosopher.
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November 22, 2010old version of a part of 1 section of Wolach's new book, Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews