HEY! I’M TEACHING THIS UPCOMING WORKSHOP! Come write with me:)
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How do we write about the body?
What does it mean to be embodied as a writer?
Where are our stories located in our bodies and what do they have to tell us?
In this five week multi-genre writing workshop, we will explore these and other questions. We will look at short literary excerpts and use writing exercises to generate new work that investigates the relationship between language and the body.
Writers of all levels and genres are welcome!
Details:
Tuesday evenings from 5-8pm
Sept. 20th and 27th, Oct. 4th, 18th and 25th
Temescal Branch Library
Meeting Room
5205 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland, CA 94609
The library and meeting room are fully accessible/ADA compliant.
This workshop series is free and open to the public, with limited space available. To register, please contact Liz at bodypoetic@gmail.com by Sept. 15th!
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Liz Latty is an Oakland-based writer, educator and activist whose work has been published in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies. She is active in queer, feminist and adoptee communities, teaches creative writing to youth, and is currently pursuing her MFA at Goddard College focused in creative nonfiction and hybrid. For more information visit her website at www.lizlatty.com.
This word: adopted. I write it again and again on long lines, on papers on clipboards in waiting rooms and offices. On paper beds that crunch underneath my nervous shifting, the sound of unknowing. I write this word {ADOPTED} in big handwriting that is not mine. Stretching it. Trying to take up that whole line. Sometimes scrawling it huge, sweeping strokes over lists of things I’m meant to check off. Tiny empty boxes meant to be filled up.
Medical history____________________________________________________________.
Family history_____________________________________________________________.
Name at birth______________________________________________________________.
How many lines can I fill with that same word? The only answer I can give. Adopted. It means I come from nothing. I know what you want to say. Just don’t. Don’t feed me your twisted unearthed definitions of something you don’t know with your teeth. It doesn’t mean I come from love or a better life or an answered prayer. It’s shit and it’s nothing; I know what it fucking means. This word is mine. A round, gaping wound. Flesh torn from bodies, a festering infection, slowly leaking.
While I compulsively search for home – WHATEVER THAT IS. My name as hollow as this thing around my neck.
A word: adopted. I write it in long lines as big as I can mange as if I take up the whole space then maybe I can be something that takes up space because I had a beginning until the period comes and it’s finally over. This having to constantly confess someone else’s shit, plant seeds of pity and orphanages and gutters and back alley abortions narrowly averted in the minds of others just because I have a fucking sore throat. They sigh at me, into my eyes, so I can feel their hearts: I‘m so sorry for your life.
I hang my head for you. For them.
In your absence, I hang my head.
And I think, where do I even begin?
I don’t know semi-colon I’m adopted.
a womb: a house or a home depending on how much light is filtered through or how long you are allowed to stay.
asked to track the surface of a house, a window, a curtain – i realize i’m still/always searching for this home. abandonment, a thing you can never fully shake from your limbs, release through tapping fingers, falling feet. i start to wonder if i can’t even track this thing (a house) – an image i see every day – in words then how can language still be useful to me in this moment? the moment of this book. a hunter, a sharp spear, a walking stick. i think in terms of immediacy, my memory: an arm of an ocean or the sea. i stalk a fantasy, a family’s footprints in snow. the little one has fallen behind.
i’m not even this kind of writer. the kind i want to be or imagine i am. i feel like shit and i’m constantly trying to be someone else or please someone else. don’t send me back, please. no wait, send me back. she’s running to catch up. still searching for this home, tracking this house. this window, a curtain. everything is too much effort. this feels pathetic and infantile. infants seem pathetic – to need so many things. how can you even stand yourself? a scent.
tumblr wasn’t necessary. it was just me trying to divert my writing yet again to a fresh surface in order to i don’t know what. something i’ve done with journals and then blogs my whole life. something happens one day and i need a new one – certain it will give me a new lease on creativity. the only thing tumblr does is give me another place to waste time online instead of working on this 20 page paper i have due in a few days. well not waste, it’s still writing, but i need to be focused right now.
focus: worked for about 4 hours today on the paper – research, notes, an interview with the lovely and gracious mattilda, transcribing the recording of the interview and deciding which blog posts from each of the 4 blogs I’m focusing on to examine as literary text w/ theory and all that shit. so progress, but still have yet to begin writing the actual 20 pages.
talking with mattilda about blogging inspired me to consider how much the urge to write a blog for an audience of some kind often keeps me from blogging. not that i WANT to write for an audience exactly, but that i feel as though i should and the blog should be “put together” somehow, which is really not what i’m about anyways – being put together. i want to work on resisting this urge more so that i can blog more because whenever i do, i feel as though it really becomes an important part of my process, helping me to remain motivated about writing, feel accomplished for the day, generate ideas that will inform other writing, help me to think about things and see things in my day that i otherwise might overlook or simply forget, etc. well so that’s my intention: resistance in order to find more openings. and also to be more vulnerable.
stir frying vegetables and making brown rice as meditation and decompression. i have just gotten home from the restaurant where I work, rained out for the evening. we don’t have much indoor seating since we are on the beach and are very beachy in that way. so when the weather is bad we are empty. the good part is i get to come home early, the bad part obviously is that i don’t make any money and then also i have to ride my orange rusty borrowed beach cruiser home in the rain (though it feels like peddling through sand because it is so old and crotchety) along the ocean where the wind is strong enough to blow the rain sideways into your eyes and even more uncomfortably, soak the thighs of your jeans through to your skin. my bangs that have recently grown out also water logged and plastered to my forehead, a scarf soaked with rain no longer cozy and by the time I ride the 7 or so minutes home, my socks have become damp through my old boots where the stitching has begun to come loose holding the leather and the soles together. Needless to say I was happy to be home and in pajamas and in front of the space heater, but to enter back into the ZONE and regain my focus on this paper, I needed a meditation. So here it is: blogging about rain while stir frying vegetables and making brown rice.
also from today a really great article/interview with Bhanu on htmlgiant re: What Is Experimental Literature? her answers are really wonderful and very much worth a read/comment. bhanu also an inspiration in vulnerability today.
and then there’s the part in which both Bhanu and I both experienced the ever so common, comment box as battleground scenario in which some people wanted to ignore the fact that one or more women were suggesting they might need to consider another perspective and instead decided to throw lopsided insults our way instead of addressing what was really at hand, or addressing it using the same old boring modes of privileged and closed minded accessment. i want to say here that the insults were directed at an idea i put forth or maybe just my way of expressing an idea that wasn’t wrought with the right kind of language, but then the insults directed towards bhanu were an assault on her body and expression of her life lived in that body, another thing entirely.
The conversation was towards an analysis of race and class on one hand within experimental literature or certain experimental communities and then also in regards to the VIDA numbers on women in publishing. Bhanu was fierce in her stance and I loved it. Sometimes though the abuse that comes through participating in comment discussions, be it on blogs, facebook, whatever, is so hard to stomach. It can be so subtle sometimes, covert, so shit covered in cake batter or maybe just like something not even really that tasty but passes for something good like when my overly health-conscious mom used to pack me a tiny orange 70’s tupperware container full of no-sugar no-salt natural peanut butter with some carob chips mixed into it as my snack in my school lunches. so comments like shit covered in natural peanut butter with carob chips stuck in it. or no that isn’t really a good metaphor cuz that snack just out right sucks as a snack (sorry mom), but my mom is the best for wanting to keep me healthy and for writing notes with hearts on the napkins she put inside the lunchbag underneath that awful snack. so intention then is we’re talking about. mom=love, racist misogynistic shitty commenters=getting over and feeling smart/powerful/winning. but you know how it is right? when u get into it with people on comments and there’s always the dick(s) who feel it’s their time to shine and will say everything under the sun to belittle you or minimize you personally somehow, yet won’t actually talk about what the fuck we came here to talk about. and then when is the time to disengage? when do you flag? when is it time to delete them or block them if the blog/profile is yours? oh interwebs, what tangled webs? you weave.
this post went on much longer than I intended. I’m not really a fan of long blog posts and i’d like to write things that i myself wouldn’t mind reading. but here maybe i was just working on that resistance.
also, my girlfriend as inspiration for vulnerability. and most other things.
when selecting images for blog posts, if i’m not posting a picture i have taken myself, i go to google images (i imagine this is what most people do as well though i don’t know) and type in a word or phrase that came from the post i’ve just written or came to me as a result of the post i’ve just written. i really like browsing the image results for the most ridiculous and seemingly unrelated picture to the words that i’ve just typed in. but then i always post the one i think is the most related or poignant or poetic or some nonsense. a buzz word from today. i think though i’ll begin to use the pictures that appear unrelated. for laughs i guess. or maybe some of my wildly imaginative friends especially all you crazy fiction-writing fucks, can write a reason, explanation, or story for the pictures in my comments.
today’s google image search: COMMENT BOX
I started a tumblr. http://lizlatty.tumblr.com/
if it’s easier for me to use then i might move my blogging there. i’m saying this to my 4 friends who follow me and my girlfriend and the one guy in liberia.
we’ll see…
i woke up from another nightmare: 8:30, but Saturday and empty. there is nothing to be done on Saturday at 8:30am so I am stuck in this position with the memory of this dream: a hostile world sends me weeping into the fetal position, the womb shape or whatever – I know nothing of gestation. or birth.
this nightmare was alive with white men hurling sexual insults and laughing at my tears, my rage, my inability to take it like a man. i folded underneath the weight of repetition. collapse. throwing limbs and spine in a heap in the sand. it was a desert and dunes. the sun hot and unrelenting. my skin a painful shade of hot pink, seared. i clawed at the earth, threw handfuls of sand into the wind.
we were somewhere outside Indianapolis; my first love nearby. i wanted to go to her but then I remembered all the things she hurled at me and felt shame. i could hear their laughter at my back, felt each vertebrae raw, as if skinless, stripped with a potato peeler. my mother’s kitchen. i’m remembering the kiki smith sculpture i once saw in the SF MOMA: a bronze and life-sized woman curled in the fetal position on a stark platform. alone, utterly. her spine exposed; a ladder or an animal carcass. i cried there, alone with her. it was reptilian, a ceremonial re-enactment. a loss: the distance between the ancient brain and the modern spine. i never forgot her.
i lay here with the memory of violence and i feel like i’m supposed to apologize or contextualize or make a joke out of every time i say something that sounds feminist or weak like white men hurling insults or my first love, but i don’t want to be apologetic or funny because i’m having a hard time just going outside lately, being with people i know or don’t know, it doesn’t matter. i have never been so sensitive, so thin-skinned and i don’t understand it, but maybe it’s the memory of violence and i’m laying with it in this womb where something else might grow. under the weight of repetition i collapse.
my dog stirs and rests her chin on top of my foot, underneath the covers. her warmth travels through to my chest. i exhale.
I got my first packet of work back in the mail from B last night and felt like I got punched in the ear – if you’ve ever gotten punched in the ear, which I have, it results in a deafening, then ringing, body buzzing/vibration, and then a certain numbness while you think damn, i just got punched in the ear. The feedback was hard, not bad, just hard and strange. my friend/classmate, who is also an advisee of B’s, suggested I read her notes aloud in a stern British accent and that perhaps would ease me back into my body. That’s what I do: disassociate, leave my body. Re-entry is difficult and requires great concentration. I let the shock of seeing some of my favorite parts cut from my manuscript and the notes leading me in new and unidentifiable directions and the possibility that I might need to start over, renew my relationship with dirt, settle overnight. I will return to it this evening and see if I can’t find an opening.
Today I will leave this bed to have brunch with a writer friend because she is performing weekly friend interventions on my isolationist ass. Then it’s back to work on my long critical paper. I am examining literary writers’ blogs as text and exploring their cultural, social, literary role, significance. using marxist theory, some and also cultural hybridity, and also my experience as an internet/blog junkie part-time stalker of writers in this new world of accessibility and fan-dom. i imagine now clicking the Contact link on Collete’s or Gertrude Stein’s blog and sending them an email telling them I’m a big follower (RSS) and was wondering if they have any thoughts on the VIDA numbers.
So I’m interviewing some writers blogs that I follow: Dodie Bellamy, Mattilda Berstein Sycamore, Ariana Reines and Kate Zambreno (wait, really, all these people agreed to talk to me?). Asking them things about binaries and technology and community and access and visibility and the blog as a literary text. I will then write a 20 page paper and impress the shit out of myself cuz I haven’t written a long critical paper since 2004.
Please pay attention: Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English
xo
This was something I always knew I’d do someday, like dying. There was never a moment where I thought I might live the rest of my life without her, or without knowing her, unless she was already dead when I found her which I felt was a decent possibility since I had been told time and again (or maybe once and there was an echo) growing up the story of my mother’s best friend who was adopted:
Ellie’s parents never told her she was adopted.
When she was in the 4th or 5th grade some kid overheard his mom talking to her mom and her mom had said it, a version of a truth, an utterance: Ellie is adopted.
So this punk ass kid goes to school the next day and tells my mom’s friend, “You’re adopted!! HA HA!”
“Shut up! No, I’m not!” Ellie screams back at him her fists balled and ready.
“Yes you are! What are you, STUPID? You’re parents are Jewish and you have blonde hair and blue eyes – LOOK at you!”
As other kids started to laugh and point, Ellie turned and ran away, her pale face burning and deeply flushed with the shame she’d just been gifted.
She went home that day and somehow managed to ask, “Mom, am I adopted?”
Her mom looked at this girl and then could no longer look at her.
Ellie turned and ran away, her blue eyes a well of terror and hot rage. In her bedroom, which no longer felt like her bedroom, she vowed to find her real parents while her body began to erase the memory of these impostors.
Ellie hated her parents for lying to her, making a fool out of her, for ruining everything. She never forgave them. When she was old enough she searched for her real parents, but when she found them they were both dead. An orphan, again and again and again.
This story is why my mom always told us we were adopted – so she wouldn’t be the unforgiven, so we would know, or have the chance of knowing. This story is why I knew I might not find what I was looking for. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t take the risk.
*I am posting my annotations for texts I am reading for my MFA program as per my initial suggestion and the subsequent request by my dear friend alicia and maybe for some other reasons. Here are 2.
Goddard English Dictionary
annotation (ˌænəʊˈteɪʃən, ˌænə-)
— n
1. a two to three page written response to a text, not in summary but rather a close read of a linguistic or structural strategy
2. the bane of earthly existence for the Goddard MFAW
Goddard English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
1976 © Goddard College. Ltd.
Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary by Rebecca Brown
In choosing this book, my aim was to see how someone else had grounded their autobiographical prose in a medical framework. Being that I’m currently in a place of imagining a structure for my thesis and investigating different aspects of somatics, biology and neuroscience, I am trying to see what I might want to do or not do with the research I am compiling.
Rebecca’s Brown’s telling of the diagnosis, treatment, hospice and eventual death of her mother while in her care is a stark portrait of humanness and artistic investigation. She uses medical terms associated with cancer, death and dying, as well as descriptions of these terms to section off the book into portraits and collages of different moments and stages of her mother’s illness. In a certain sense, the naming of each section and the corresponding description of each medical term prepares the reader for what lies ahead, as if entering the hospital room of an injured or ill loved one and the doctor tries to prepare you for what you are about to see. The “vomit” section is a good example of this: you know what you’re getting into; you know it’s going to be graphic and hard to read on a bodily as well as an emotional level. What follows is an intensely detailed description of the effects cancer and chemotherapy had on her mother’s body.
In another way, the medical terms help bring clarity to the process of dying, specifically from cancer, and they also bridge the gap between how we think of disease in purely biological terms and how we experience it in a personal, human, and relational sense. Brown does this by laying them down next to each other and letting the reader experience their relationship in proximity to each other. Sometimes the relationship is very obvious, many times there are subtle ways in which the medical term has been absorbed into the section’s text. For instance the “twilight sleep” section (“a semiconscious condition induced by the hypodermic administration of morphine and scopolamine. In this state the memory of pain is abolished but not the pain itself”) where Brown is describing her mother’s surgery and recovery when the diagnosis was still new, there were subtle moments throughout the section where the memory of pain is induced and explored, including the narrator’s own pain/memory throughout this experience. This whole section is interesting too in terms of the narrative of the body and what it allows us to feel, think, tell ourselves, absorb, and remember especially in times of extreme physical and/or emotional crisis.
Another way the section headings and definitions/explanations work well is as a piece of writing on their own. The way Brown chose the information to give on each heading – their spatial arrangement on the page, and the language with which they are conveyed – creates tiny poems almost out of each one. Although I may not have thought it at first, as the book moves along, they became really beautiful to read on their own.
I really liked the way Rebecca Brown structured this book with the use of medical information as a marker, not of time or space, since the book was not told in a linear narrative, but to examine the relationships between the body and the mind, between Western Medicine and the human capacity to heal itself and one another, and the fear and grief we all experience in dealing with death and dying.
——
Event Factory by Renee Gladman
In Event Factory we are transported with a traveling linguist narrator to the city of Ravicka where she experiences an urban area from which its inhabitants are fleeing, though she does not understand why. What unfolds during the narrator’s time in Ravicka is a series of events that raises questions about language, culture, desire, architecture, urbanization, memory, documentation and perhaps lots of other things I am either forgetting or missing all together. This is a complex work and it is easy to see why Gladman plans to write two more books set in Ravicka.
The question of alienation in the context of language and foreign bodies is what most interested me in this text. The narrator, a linguist and a foreigner, travels to Ravicka for an unspecified reason and finds herself alienated by a collective consciousness she does not understand. Though she is fluent in their language, she still manages to be isolated from the root problem within this city. The book unfolds as a series of events, something to look at but without the explanation, in language, of what it is. This puts the document almost in the realm of an anthropological account, but because it is from the perspective of an alienated other, for me it brings up associations of missionary work or colonial narratives in which a native story is told through a foreign body and with the intention of trying to “get” or fix them. Gladman’s narrator ponders at one point if she should be the one to do something about it, this It she cannot even comprehend with language.
When she travels to Old Ravicka, things become even more linguistically complex, as the people there speak a language that is nearly incomprehensible to her – a language of breath and gaps; an entirely somatic and energetic form of communication. And so the linguist comes to a place in which language fails her. She says, “Listening to them was like gathering water without a pail.”
The narrator, again as a sort of anthropological documentation, wants to record her experience in Old Rivicka, but cannot figure out how to represent a language that has no words. Here I think about the gestures she refers to (“you watch him standing in front of you, using the recognizable gestures”) and how her text is gesturing towards something else about language: the language of the body, the things that are impossible to communicate with language alone and/or even if communicated with spoken language, cannot then be translated into the written word with any sort of accuracy.
This brings up issues around the difference between hearing and seeing something unconventional versus writing/reading something that does not take the form of language and syntax that we have been taught. The idea of an othered sort of language that (othered because it is without syntax, because its architecture is not in a sense tangible) becomes the alienator. The narrator seems to be able to understand, with assistance, the gestures, gaps and breathes of the language, but can only represent them by using the prescriptive elements of her own language to describe the speaker’s body. Therein lies a question (for my own work): how does one write the language of the body? And if one cannot write the language of the body, how does one continue to write about the body in an accurate representation that does not alienate the body from its own experience?
I haven’t posted recently because I haven’t been doing any school work. I had to work where they pay me for 4 days in a row and then I got sick and then I went out of town to see old friends and celebrate new life. I feel really behind and wanna get all self-loathy about it, but I try to remind myself what the poet Diane DiPrima (now the poet laureate of San Francisco hoorah!) told me once over Japanese food in Noe Valley: “Sometimes life gets in the way of writing – it’s ok, you can let it.” So life got in the way and here I am at my desk, all hopped up on cold medicine, trying to complete two more annotations and write about pre-verbal or trans-verbal somatic experiencing except nothing’s really happening. I’m staring out the window. There is numbness and dread.
I was reading Kate Zambreno’s blog today about her experience at the AWP. And can we pause for a moment to ask or wonder about the AWP – who is this for? I read a good portion of the schedule of panels for the convention and they all seemed sooooo fucking tight-assed, conservative, completely behind the times, banal, pretentious, or totally irrelevant and unrepresentative of what I care about, think about, care to write about. I know some of my Goddard pals attended this year and I am curious to see what being there in real life was like for them. So this thing Kate Zambreno wrote about her experience at the AWP solidfying something she already knew about herself: she’s a fucked up, fuck up, likes to fuck kind of girl and thats who she’s writing for – those girls, the messy ones, the vulgur, the scary, the too-much girl, not the poetic elite, not the panel after panel of fucks at the AWP. because she is one, she always has been one – a fucked up girl. I loved that, yanno, someone who is in the stratosphere of all these (mostly) women writers who I love reading and who write about shit I care about but are also in that universe of the academics, the philosophers, the innovators, etc. to just say, i was a fucked up girl and i write for fucked up girls and i love that about myself was just really nice to hear as a fuck up. Thanks Kate Zambreno!
Today’s anxiety:
1. being behind in my schoolwork
2. all the shit I want/need to read that I don’t have time for
3. the reasons why I think I don’t have time for them and what that says about me as a person
4. preparing to talk with Eleni Stecopoulos this week about her Poetics of Healing project and being scared I’ll forget how to talk or behave in public
5. has my dog forgiven me yet for going out of town and leaving her for the last 30 hours – she seems despondent
6. i don’t take enough notes
7. how hereditary exactly is ADHD?
Leaving tomorrow night for San Francisco to do some research for the book and a critical paper I have to write this semester. Also seeing friends and getting TATTOOED!!!
from my weekend in San Diego (me putting perfume on while Amy takes photos in the hotel mirror):
Friday night, reading Renee Gladman’s Event Factory with my door open and my dog napping on the bed. I live in an upstairs flat, my two neighbors’ doors inches from my own sharing a landing. We often leave them open, to talk or listen or feel less closed off I guess. My neighbor’s 9 year old son loves to play with my dog who he only calls Puppy!, never her name. Today at the dog park I got into it with a man who decided he was better than another man because he has a home. How a houseless person is not allowed in public spaces occupied by those with houses because they are not considered part of the public and are somehow a threat to the natural order of things. How property has always equaled entitlement or wisdom or worth. The cops were nearly involved, physical threats were made and in the end his ego fled the scene pulling his property on a tattered leash between his legs. Cunty ass dog owners.
Really excited because one of the women in my advisory group (each advisor at Goddard has about 4 to 7 advisees per semester and when we are at school during the residencies we meet and work together as a group) is also reading Event Factory right now so we have decided to have a joint read and email discourse of the book. Very exciting for me as you know if you read my lament in a previous post about the challenge of always being alone with a text in a low residency program. Sometimes you really need to talk with someone else about a book and we are both very excited about this one. I mean really, who doesn’t get a lady boner over a new Renee Gladman book?
from an Egyptian pamphlet made by activists and hand delivered to people prior to the start of the current mass protests:
Oh and the fact that Ive moved onto Renee Gladman means I finished my annotation for Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. Here it is if you’re interested. Wait I was going to talk about something: I realized today that I had so much resistance in beginning my first critical paper this semester because I feel really intimated writing for, not for but you know for, my new advisor. I had gotten used to my last avisor, felt safe, now it’s all new again, starting over with a new foster parent, foster writer, whatever. The pangs of rejection, wanting to please, please-don’t-give-me-back syndrome (very common in adoptees), wanting to feel good enough and all of that. Though of course my adult brain says, what the fuck did u go to art school for if not to be reamed a new asshole so you could grow and shed and birth new life? So getting over the fear of rejection, my first annotation of the semester:
Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities by Kazim Ali
The inside cover of Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities calls this beautiful work of prose “trans-genre,” noting the several different modes of narrative Ali weaves together throughout the book. In regards to my own work, which operates from within a desire to explore the spaces and gaps in between genres, identities, families, cultures, and places, Ali’s “trans-genre” form became the most interesting and charged site of inquiry.
Ali’s form moves back and forth between prose poetry, historical and geographical exposition, memoir, and travel writing of sorts (though he lives, if even for a short time, in each of the cities he writes about). This movement creates a pendulation and disorientation for the reader that mimics the writer’s personal journey as he grapples with being queer, Muslim, American, an English speaker, an artist, a son, a lover, and also simply an adult person in the world, as it is in many regards a “coming of age” story or reflection. As a person inhabiting the spaces in between religious/cultural expectations and queerness, Ali is in a constant state of pull between the conflictual nature of his multiple identities. The text as a result seems to push and pull the reader between and across the boundaries of identifiable form and structure.
I am reminded of Lyn Hejinian’s “open and closed texts” while I witness both Ali as a person/character and Ali as a writer move back and forth between sentences and spaces/desires that have open and closed tendencies. Hejinian characterized a closed text as one that allows for a single interpretation while an open text has all its elements “maximally exited” and therefore multiple readings become possible. As Ali speaks of his parents, the cultural expectations he feels bound to, and his struggle to live as an openly gay working artist, he often moves within a type of prose that feels more like conventional memoir – you are reading the story, what happened when. As he writes towards spaces where he feels freer or allows himself to be freer in his life (with his lovers, in his art, in his cities), so the text follows toward openness/fragmentation and away from convention. The places where he presents with a form more likened to historical and geographical expository writing feel like in between spaces where he grounds himself or makes sense out of things, maybe even disassociates with information or takes a break from it all, while emotionally the pendulum swings in violent, isolating, and alienating successions.
“Under any city other cities still exist. Under any body other bodies.” Ali says. We build our lives and identities on top of so many stories/cities, so many memories/bodies and Ali builds form and text on top of one another and exhumes them out from under each other at the same time. He tells the story of the immigrants’ child, the person of color, the criminalized and marginalized, the queer, the faithful and questioning, the writer, the abandoned, and the wounded. The movement between forms, as much as the investigation of the spaces in between (the spaces we become) and the things unsaid (in a sculpture: what’s taken away) beautifully illustrates how a writer can create form from content and subvert the notion of a form that simply requires content.
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