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The Rooted
Heart
Sylvia Um
Paper in glassine sleeve
Price: $25 ISBN 1-888553-07-3
The Rooted Heart was
written during the poet’s treatment for non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma, and is her only published collection. Sylvia
Um, who died in 1997, won the Arizona Regents’ Academic
Achievement Award and the Hattie Lockett Poetry Award. This chapbook
celebrates and commemorates her life and work. The cloth edition
is hand sewn into boards covered in white or tan Japanese ceremonial
paper. An abstracted "image" of Um’s class notes,
blind-stamped into pillowy-white Rives BFK paper, appears on the
cover of the paper edition. |
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Anatomy of Desire
Lucinda Bliss
and Alison Deming
The Daughter/Mother Sessions
with introductory essay "Immanent Desire" by Faith
Wilding
Price: $25 ISBN 1-888553-11-1
What might happen if an English professor,
a powerful voice in modern poetry and creative nonfiction, conspired
with her daughter, a visual artist and young mother, to articulate
desire? The dialogue that ensues, in the words of Faith Wilding,
"is an opening into fearsome and sublime territories, where
home comforts and home truths are scarce; where ancient hierarchies
and silences have been broken."
Anatomy of Desire
is a poetic dialogue between visual artist/daughter Lucinda Bliss
and writer/mother Alison Deming about the nature
of desire:
Desire enlivens our art and our lives.
We are interested in the radical possibilities of articulating
that desire. In exploring the culture of maternity through the
lens of our particular experience, we want to illuminate some
of the fictions we have supported in ourselves and in each other
and ask what personal and cultural systems these fictions have
served.
The book construction reflects the revelation,
femininity, and equality of the author’s dialogue. The cover
of the portfolio features an image by Bliss—a long black
slit, stitched across, the opening of which feels like an act
of delicate undressing. "Immanent Desire," the essay
by Faith Wilding, is printed on a single, unbound folio
of white, eighty-pound, vertically striated cover stock. Beneath
the essay the spare, heartfelt, dialogue is printed on vertical
facing pages, like panels of a French door. The printed conversation
happens side by side, mother's voice on the right, daughter's
on the left as if the two were speaking face to face. |
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