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Book description

Notation is comprised of a single poetic line that navigates the contours of memory in the fallout of personal loss. Written over the course of eighteen months and expanded by friendship, literature, nature study, and travel, Notation questions the boundaries of a book and blurs the parameters of authorship through numerous intertexts and exacting observations of daily life. For Jordan Dunn, “the idea of the perfect book remains thousands of unbound sheets, photographs, and notes spread across a vast table.” Insisting on rearrangement as a primary mode of composition and recollection, Dunn writes, “I grow satisfied not by the plain texture of my life’s story, not by the secure structure of its becoming, but by the sheer unreliability of its patterning, as if my self divides but I remain unaware of its division until I return to my starting point.”

About the author

Jordan Dunn is the author of Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press) as well as various chapbooks and ephemeral prints including Common Names, Reactor Woods, and A Walk at Doolittle State Preserve. He lives with his family in Madison, WI, where he edits and publishes Oxeye Press.

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Book description

In Walden Pond, Patty Nash probes and plays with the first-person pronoun, investigating the construction of national identities and the way nations construct the identities of individuals in turn. From the medieval merchant town of Lübeck to the high desert of central Oregon, the Adriatic Sea to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nash explores and interrogates the historical forces that shape her—and our—“I”. Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden (1854), declared, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” Nash responds: “Content am I.”

Praise

Restless, playful, deeply strange, the poems in Walden Pond read like scripts for a long-lost masque commissioned by a mad but hyper-literate archduke. Von Kleist in Hollywood. Goldilocks, having read Freud. READER I AM TRYING TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA. These poems wear costumes. They are costumes. They have a formal intelligence, perform intricately constructed language games: “silkwormish.” They might be a hoax. – SARA NICHOLSON

Poetry is the art of dislocation. Such is the case of this book, with its dislocation of setting, dislocating syntax, and dislocated semantics. Patty Nash asks: what is the unit of poetic speech, and what holds a sequence of such units together? That is to say: what is the unit of experience, and what holds a sequence of such units together? It is her sophisticated ear, perfect rhythm, and cleanness of diction that hold the dislocated together. – EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY

About the author

Patty Nash’s work has appeared in Sixth Finch, West Branch, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. She received MFAs in poetry and literary translation from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa. She lives in Berlin, Germany.