On SUNDAY 8 SEPT 2019 at 17h30
by
JENNIFER K DICK
of LILITH :
A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt
Press, 2019)
at The Red Wheelbarrow
Bookshop
9 rue de Médicis 75006, RER
Luxembourg / M° Odéon ou Cluny-La Sorbonne
Extracts in French will be read by Virginie Poitrasson
“Made of gathered dust and the poet’s
fine attention, made of making itself, recovered in the marked acts of dreaming
and writing, a powerful and transformative feminine figure emerges in Jennifer K.
Dick’s latest collection. Bleeding through the veil of ripped wallpaper that
haunted Charlotte Perkins Gilman, brilliantly imagined out of stain and shadow
into sensual life, this at once contemporary and mythic woman becomes our
avatar and intimate: “Lili.” Both an “invitation to see” and, literally, a
vision, the result of “rough loving” and splendid—hybrid—writing, Lili is a
glorious “cast” (think sculpture, yes, but also outcast and cast of characters,
and do keep in mind Mallarmé’s cast of the dice…). Complicating and expanding
ideas about identity and femininity, subject and object, novel and verse, Lilith
is this poet’s most amazing wager and work.”—Laura Mullen
“Jennifer K
Dick’s Lilith is a plunge of variance – columns, clusters, superscripts,
blocks of plot – that delivers its heroin(e) to and from a self. In the woods
or in a room of broken porcelain, Lili basks in neuroinformation and Narcissus,
getting away from getting away. “Recoil is to leap as harmony is to nail”: this
book’s beautiful movement goes everywhere into fragmentation. A fluent
multiplicity from Dick’s world-rend(er)ing imaginations.”
—Lisa
Samuels
“Lillith. A Novel in Fragments. Etymology of ‘novel’—"fictitious
narrative," 1560s, from Italian novella
"short story," originally "new story," from Latin novella
"new things"… If we are to have a feminist poetics, a feminist
poetry, that will have to be a ‘new thing.’ And new things are notoriously
difficult to recognize and interpret. Jennifer K. Dick’s newest (in every sense
of the word) book challenges us on every level: within the first few pages, we
are confronted with scattered words on the page, an overprinted graphic, a
phrase printed upside down… This book is an enormous (perhaps endless) journey,
and, like all great journeys, includes elements of circularity, of reimaging,
reimagining. We wander in a labyrinth of mirrors, seeing ourselves in these
repeated, fragmentary stories, and in the deep and complex eroticism of this
text. This is a book that resists summary or description. Like all real novels,
it wants to and succeeds in including everything, especially moments of
astonishingly lyrical writing: As now, on
the bed, a feather, pages. This book is an event. It isn’t about anything.
It is something.”
—Ed Smallfield
(author, publisher of Apogee Press books, USA,
& editor of Parentheses
literary magazine, Barcelona)