This work takes the form of a conversation, an interview. An obsessive questioning back and forth builds up Blanchot's narrative, with its sense--shared with Kafka's famous doorkeeper parable--that behind each question lies the spooky possibility of a further, more imposing, more insoluble question. Thematically, powerlessness, inertia, insufficient speech, weariness, falling, faltering--everything tied to a negative or nonexistent value in ordinary discourse--is given value here by its being articulated, moved into writing and thought. What's insignificant or worthless gathers weight through its troubling persistence, its failure to disappear. The endless conversation of Blanchot's writing turns fiction toward an experience of listening--a far cry from the storytelling most fiction (still) takes itself to be.

The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me

Literature & Fiction

Blanchot, Maurice

Contemporary

Station Hill Press @ Barrytown

Lissa Wolsak, a poet who seemingly emerged fully-formed in the mid-1990s, now offers access to the realized body of her work in this collection. Neither easily classified nor directly traceable to a particular school or lineage, she stands instead within her own continuously evolving context-one as free of convention and fashion as it is independent of thought outside the work itself. The mirror would do well to reflect further, demands Jean Cocteau's Orphic radio voice, and Wolsak's poetry answers to this strange admonition: For the self-reflective moment in her work takes us far beyond familiar literary practices of self-attention and recursive discourse. Again and again this work reaches a genuinely mysterious interpenetration of vivid awareness, renewed language, and human care.SQUEEZED LIGHT includes all of Wolsak's previously published poetry to date, her essay in poetics An Heuristic Prolusion, an interview with the author, and an introductory essay by George Quasha with Charles Stein.

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

Wolsak, Lissa

Poetry

Product Description “Words say too much to let you know the truth.’’ George Quasha’s torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. Waking from Myself is the sixth volume published of George Quasha’s “preverbs,” an invented poetic genre that’s the flipside of “proverbs”—instead of giving capsules of wisdom, they awaken language to its inevitable ambiguities in the face of complex truth-telling. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. If William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” are poetry, then George Quasha’s preverbs are like a close cousin. Its core question is: can poetry say the unsayable? About the Author George Quasha is a poet, artist, musician and writer working in diverse mediums to explore certain principles (e.g., axiality, ecoproprioception). For his primary medium poiesis he has invented the genre preverbs as a medium of axial language and “linguality at zero point.” Seven of the thirteen books of preverbs have been published to date. Poetry in Principle: Essays in Poetics (foreword by Edward Casey, 2019) contains recent writing on “the poetics of thinking.” Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (2022) is a collection of writings on his poetry, art and thought by sixteen authors, edited by Burt Kimmelman, foreword by Jerome McGann. He has been awarded the T-Space 10th annual Poetry Award (2022). His ongoing video work was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), principally for art is/music is/poetry is (Speaking Portraits), for which he has recorded over a thousand artists, poets, and composers in eleven countries saying what art, music, or poetry is (art-is-international.org)—represented in the book art is (Speaking Portraits) (2016). His axial stones, drawings and video have been exhibited in various venues, including the Snite Museum of Art, the Manfred Baumgartner Gallery, White Box, the Samuel Dorsky Museum and biennials (Poland, Switzerland, New York). Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (foreword by Carter Ratcliff, 2006) explores the axial principle in his sculpture. Other writing on art includes An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works & Writings (with Charles Stein, foreword by Lynne Cooke, 2009). Poetry previous to preverbs include Somapoetics (1973), Giving the Lily Back Her Hands (1979), and Ainu Dreams (with Chie Hasegawa [Hammons], 1999). He lives in Barrytown, New York, collaborating with Susan Quasha on photography /preverbs (six series of their sixteen combined works available online), and together they publish Station Hill Press.

Waking From Myself

Quasha, George

Literary

This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism, writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.

Death Sentence

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Books by Station Hill Press @ Barrytown

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Station Hill Press @ Barrytown publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me

Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

Waking From Myself

Death Sentence