Afterrimages, Paperback

Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language, the many humors of chance and design, as they intersect and leave their traces on the page. All of civilization to date, all of history is after all aftermath, afterthought, afterimage. The language graphics of AFTERRIMAGES lay claim to the fragility--the gift, the terror, and the whimsy--of the remnant that all images are. Their playful nature is born of the conviction that the present tense--tense, tensile with immanent futurity--must extend itself toward the unintelligible and unknown. This is the frontier where the image hovers on the edge of its own transfiguration, the threshold where poetry can take place.

About author(s):JOAN RETALLACK is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which--Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont'd /--was named a best book of 2010 by Artforum. In addition to Afterrimages, other titles include Memnoir, How To Do Things With Words, and Errata 5uite--chosen by Robert Creeley for the 1994 Columbia Book Award. She is co-author with John Cage, of MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES on Words, Art, Music. Retallack is the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.