Evergreen, 1 (2017)

26 August 2017, dusan

The Evergreen Review, the feisty independent magazine known as “the heart of the Beats,” returns. The new Evergreen builds on a legacy of searching out the stories that aren’t being told or aren’t being heard: stories that challenge our sensibilities and expand our understanding of the way people actually live in the world and the way their truths can be expressed. Available free of charge online, the magazine features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from an international array of new and established writers.

Our first issue features work from acclaimed writers such as Jeffery Renard Allen and Gary Indiana; emerging talents such as filmmaker Frances Bodomo, photographer Hadji Johnali, and writer Jade Sharma; and well-known artists in mid-career, including novelists Yoko Tawada and Álvaro Enrigue and painters Joy Garnett and Katie Merz.

Evergreen pushes aesthetic and political boundaries: Bodomo is Ghanaian, Enrigue Mexican, Johnali Iranian, and Tawada Japanese-German. Johnali’s full-sized photographs of Muslim prayer rugs inscribed with wry graffiti challenge notions of piety and identity. Allen’s essay, “Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter,” begins with the assertion “White folks in America are the most dangerous people on earth. No two ways about it.” Gary Indiana’s “Romanian Conversation” centers on the relationship between an American writer and someone who is presumably his paid male companion, as they observe a group of heterosexual prostitutes and their pimps working a street in Romania. And Yoka Tawada’s “Memoirs of a Polar Bear” is just that: the life story of a talking polar bear sent as a gift from the USSR to East Berlin.

Although dedicated to new work, Evergreen cherishes its awe-inspiring past. The debut issue features founding publisher Barney Rosset’s account of the Tropic of Cancer obscenity trials, as well as a nod to one of Evergreen’s most famous alums in “Samuel Beckett Is Closed” by Michael Coffey. Evergreen takes advantage of the possibilities of digital publishing to feature dynamic visuals, including original films like Bodomo’s Boneshaker, the story of an African family looking for a church meeting in the deep South.” (Source)

Publisher Evergreen Review, New York, NY, April 2017

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See also selected back issues of Evergreen Review, 1957-2003.

M. NourbeSe Philip: Zong! (2008)

26 August 2017, dusan

“A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.”

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, and Mercury Press, Toronto, 2008
Wesleyan Poetry series
ISBN 9780819568762, 0819568767
xii+211 pages

Reviews: Tyrone Williams (African Am Rev, 2009), Helen Klonaris (sx salon, 2011).
Commentary: Fred Wah (Jacket2, 2013), Janet Neigh, Phanuel Antwi and Veronica Austen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Evie Shockley, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Jacket2, 2013), Jenny Sharpe (Interventions, 2014).
Interview: Paul Watkins (Toronto Rev Books, 2014).

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Philip reading from Zong! (audio, 2007-2016)

Len Lye: Motion Sketch (2014)

24 August 2017, dusan

“Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance.

Motion Sketch reintroduces Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.”

Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the catalogue reveals how Lye’s concept of “doodling” underpinned his approach to much of his work. ”

Featuring a foreword by Brett Littman and essays by Gregory Burke, Tyler Cann, and Len Lye.

Publisher Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 115
ISBN 9780942324853, 0942324854
97 pages
via publisher

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