Nevertheless Enjoyment

by Elizabeth Bryant

"With vivid language that denies easily attained unambiguous and unlayered emotion, the pieces in (NEVERTHELESS ENJOYMENT examine and reexamine what satisfaction means through the lens of intimate experience. From “slumps in the middle where history is,” to “the drab-colored female being more of a challenge,” Elizabeth Bryant portrays details of the human condition in surprising and unsettling terms. Central to this work of serial prose poetry is the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept “jouissance,” which is often loosely translated as “enjoyment.” Bryant uses the word to convey not only pleasure, achievement and satisfaction, but also fixation, obstruction and conflict. This nuanced volume conveys the sense that a precise understanding of jouissance is elusive, and may be fully perceived only in hindsight. Showing the influence of writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino and Carla Harryman, Elizabeth Bryant’s direct prose provides evidence of an ever-present life force that is at once ineffable and brutally powerful." - Gian Lombardo

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2010

About the author

Elizabeth Bryant's serial prose poem (nevertheless enjoyment, was published Spring 2010 by Quale Press, and is available at SPD and Amazon. A review of (nevertheless enjoyment is now available in Rain Taxi (summer 2010).

She is the author of 4 chapbooks: MAENAD (Kavyayantra Press1996), Apprehension (with Women's Studio Workshop 2006), Fluorescence Buzz (Hex Presse/Dusie Kollektiv 2009), and No Subject (Dusie Kollektiv 2010).

Her writing appears in many print and online journals including Delirious Hem, Wheelhouse Magazine, Dusie, Bombay Gin, Key Satch(el), Gerry Mulligan, and Intercapillary Space. She was editor of the ongoing writing experiment Defeffable, and former co-curator of the Bard Roving Reading Series.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

i actually wrote a blurb for elizabeth's book...

The other day I was standing behind a couple in a grocery line, and what I saw between them was the space between two phrases in Elizabeth Bryant’s *(nevertheless enjoyment* — both a gap unbridgeable in that Zeno’s paradox way, and a connection made brilliant by currents of thought and significance. I now see Bryant’s interphrasal spaces everywhere. And when I don’t see them, I make them. Rather than penning journal entries after reflection upon a day’s events, Bryant pushes cognition through her days with this book—opening up consecutivity, complexity, redundancy, and simultaneity in charged paragraph forms. Through episodes with birds, lovers, and ideas, *(nevertheless enjoyment* is nothing short of a field guide to sentience. It is a resource to take into the grocery stores, meadows, workplaces, and bedrooms of one’s days. It is a reminder that meanings are made, not found. Use this book.

[Geof Huth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review at dbqp: visualizing poetics.