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鈥淭o survive romantic love, the woman served the other woman desert dirt with shells as the truck stop receded into the distance鈥濃攕o observes the mordantly detached voice of a women, an extravagantly pained, self-and-other-lacerating imaginative journey dedicated 鈥渢o relationship.鈥 Auto-ethnographic postmortem on love, fragmented body floating through distillations of desire, sex, and death, lyric fever dream, avant-garde performance piece, manifesto of queer resistance, Vanessa Roveto鈥檚 phantasmagorical second book is several contradictory states bound together in a single invented language, resembling but never quite identifying with our own.

鈥淲e should all be so aware, so alive, so consequential, so Vanessa Roveto. Language is no match, so she leaves it behind in a rush to explore what it means to her. We鈥檒l call it poetry until she comes up with a better word.鈥欌濃Foreword Reviews
鈥淭he plurality鈥攐r, plural-ness鈥攐f Vanessa Roveto鈥檚 a women is ingenious and ecstatic, uncontrollable. Ingenious because Roveto is devising a new language within the very limits of American English; ecstatic and uncontrollable because once one starts listening to the extra grammars underneath, within, and alongside words, it鈥檚 hard to stop. The plots that unfold within and around these extra- and intra-linguistic spaces are of romantic, filial, and national consequence. To cite Gertrude Stein from The Making of Americans, 鈥楾his is now a description of learning to listen to all repeating that every one always is making of the whole of them.鈥 Or, as Roveto puts it, 鈥榬esonances discovered in the jumps between posting about it and telling you how I feel.鈥欌濃擫ucy Ives, author, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World
鈥淟ike those paper fortune tellers folded by young girls, the world(s) of a women are plural, adjacent, playful, shrewd, and constantly unfolding. Roveto makes fluid use of prose form, dressing romance as bildungsroman, elegy as ekphrasis, haibun as virtual reality scroll, each sentence鈥檚 gesture seeming to take place in at least two worlds at once. This is writing both replete and exact, brainy and feely, as if the cosmos could be recharted through the most intimate coordinates: 鈥榟er letter became a ladder, an amateur honeypot to the sky.鈥 I love these succulent, mathy gambits.鈥濃擩oyelle McSweeney, author, Toxicon and Arachne 

Paperback

ISBN-13
9781609387341
Retail price
$21.00
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eBook, Perpetual

ISBN-13
9781609387358
Retail price
$21.00

Publication Details

Publication Details

Publication Date
10/15/2020
Pages
72
Trim size
6脳8
Edition
1st