BrickBrickBrick

by Mark Laliberte

BrickBrickBrick is background reading brought to the forefront.

With this new collection, poet Mark Laliberte presents a series of visual meditations on the subject of "assembly poetics". Like much of his recent output, this project hovers around � but never quite steps into � the cultural zone that pure, popular comics inhabit.

The hybrid "texts" presented in this volume (slowly developed from 2001-08), appropriate and invade the hand-made illustrative markings of different illustrators or cartoonists, as they draw bricks � usually in the backgrounds of city scenes. Each drawn source is pulled forward and stripped of all signs of their original narrative intent. In a process that is metaphorically connected to the careful manipulation of written words on a page, each work is digitally constructed � brick-by-brick � into new and distinct walls that the reader will likely enjoy hitting up against.

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2010

About the author

Mark Laliberte is a Southern Ontario-based writer/artist/designer whose poems and pageworks have appeared in publications big and small, including Descant, Ink Brick, Poetry, prairie fire, Prefix Photo, subTerrain and Vallum. Recent solo books include asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther), BookBook (above/ground) and Explosive Comic (Swimmers Group). His writing has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the City of Windsor's Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

Laliberte is also a member of MA|DE, an exploratory collaborative writing entity, whose first full-length book of poetry, ZZOO, is set to debut with Palimpsest Press on their Anstruther Books imprint in Spring 2025 (pre-order a copy at https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/zzoo... ); they have also completed their next two collections, Alphabeticals and Detourism (forthcoming 2028).

Laliberte was editor and designer of the Canadian hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL (http://carouselmagazine.ca/) for a 20-year period (36 issues completed, 2002-23), publisher at the experimental comics press Popnoir Editions from 2016-21, and curator of the international constraint-based comics community The 4PANEL Project (https://4panel.ca/); he recently retired from all these positions to focus exclusively on his own work — and has now completed his latest manuscript, Circularities.

Reviews

[Louis Cabri]

Each page consists of title and image of stylized brickwork. The title is a key to a comic book series. For example, the title "Barks" refers to Disney's Carl Barks. For me, who doesn't know that many comic books, the immediate connection doesn't go from title to comic book series but from title to image of stylized brickwork. What I see is drawn brickwork. What I read is the phonetic alphabet spelling out a single name (last names, I think). What I think about is their graphemic and phonemic/phonetic resonances with each other -- between the letter-sound sequence of the name and the drawing style of the bricks. A personality comes out. Tone colour. So my reference, when it comes to reference, is rather to someone like Henri Michaux -- not his drug or travel books but his experiments with the grapheme in his scribblings and lines as they combine with his writings in books such as Stroke by Stroke (trans Richard Sieburth) and Emergences/Resurgences.

[Thomas Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bricks from various comics make poems that again make comics.

[Jade Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comics/poetry crossover icon.