Lit Preview: Larva & Hedge by Pilar Fraile Amador

Entry into the surreal world(s) of this two-book masterpiece may be a bit daunting, but an important clue is left for us, by the poet, in the grass.

Nocturnal trees fell over you
 
pleas of my grandmother weeping esparto
in a house made of silence.

Like the esparto that marks our first tastes of larval life, the poet’s language sprouts up on two sides of the same sea. And like the esparto grass, it is polymorphic, woven into a variety of movements and functions that determine the reader’s position. Moreover, it grounds us in context. Esparto is particularly important in Spain (where the poet is from), especially in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. It is a grass endemic to the western Mediterranean that grows on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula and across the strait of Gibraltar in northern Africa—a transcontinental species. There is, I suspect, a subcutaneous political awareness in these books (especially Hedge), but let’s begin at the beginning.

Larva starts with whispers of small things. Close, impressionistic fragments of language trace circles around the “hidden places” of the body. A dissolution of canny logic gives way to feral reason stretching backward for lost enlightenment. An effort to escape the looming presence of death itself. This book ends where it began, having circled back to the inescapable need of all living things. Larva lays a temporal foundation for what follows.

The loose lineations of the first book bleed into the tight, post-apocalyptic blocks of Hedge. There is a perspectival ambiguity here, following a narrative We neither man nor woman, hunter nor domestic, but perhaps young, fragrant, post-human, salvatory. Otherworldly creatures are kept to be slaughtered. And all seems hedged in by some invisible force, some wet protective (re)membran(c)e through which “bones go on falling from the sky”. On the other side of the hedge, the world seems to go up in smoke and flame. Here I know and understand the hedge as a border, marked by groans of global nationalism, war and fascism, exodus, and xenophobia. These alien figures, on both sides of the hedge, are an uncanny reflection of our nomadic present.

along the border of the hedge. the men have climbed
up with harsh liquids. they’ve made wounds in the
trunks. they’ve poured flammable rocks inside.

The men here embody violence and the women, passive measure. But it’s the We, the young and unindoctrinated, that the reader follows on their journey to traverse the Hedge.

Larva & Hedge, marvelously translated by Lizzie Davis, is an explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic. Its strange music having built up to blazing crescendo—surreal portrait of a world on fire—concludes with a whimper of an epilogue, dancing over and around the hedge, leaving the reader with an acrid taste. Recognition, perhaps, that the hedge itself transforms both subject and object into the abject. 

Excerpts from Lizzie's translation of Pilar's poetry can be found in TBSR no. 6. Also here and here. 

Our exclusive preview of Art:21, season 6

a r t : 2 1 : 6

The good folks representing PBS's incredible series on art in the 21st century (DKC) were kind enough to forward us a preview copy of season 6! I have to say, this is my favorite season by far. It premieres friday, April 13th at 9pm (est)

This season's four episodes:

CHANGE

Catherine Opie

El Anatsui

Ai Weiwei

BOUNDARIES

David Altmejd

Tabaimo

assume vivid astro focus

Lynda Benglis

HISTORY

Glenn Ligon

Mary Reid Kelley

Marina Abramovic

BALANCE

Rackstraw Downes

Robert Mangold

Sarah Sze

Glenn Ligon: from the Runaways series

The UnRealist

AP--May 22, 2011. Zinc Bar. Warm day, overcast. A rustic gate, bolt locked, barring a set of steps descending into the reddish-grayish maw of Zinc. This gate, the sort we imagine of old lift elevators, opened at 5pm behind the lethargic efforts of an older Indian gentleman. He asked that I return in a half hour.

I circled the block for 24 minutes and returned a bit early to a bar quietly, but pleasantly, populated. A new curator is in town. He announced himself fingering a glass of whiskey with a serious expression, but an ever-friendly attitude. Long black hair, neatly pulled back. Jeans with the cuffs turned up. A sort of Milesian cool. David Jou, for his first crack at the Zinc Bar reading series, had asked the poets Paul Legault, Kendra Grant Malone and the mysterious Jon Leon. A wonderfully intriguing roster.

Kendra and Paul, it goes without saying, were wonderful readers. Kendra's voice moves with thread-bare intensity behind a poetry of grotesque charm. She read some from her first collection Everything is Quiet and some new poems from her forth-coming collection Morocco. Paul read an effervescent mix of poetry and (after being coaxed into an encore performance) Virginia Woolf prose that was precise and incredible. (Some of his work can be heard playing in the Bronx Botanical Garden--apparently a favorite of Michelle Obama)

But Jon Leon. Who is Jon Leon? The Man--The Poet. Remains something of an enigma. He read from a previously published story, Hit Wave, which was written from the depths of a penitentiary in Georgia (The Poet was considered a threat on an outbound flight). Penitent? Maybe. Maybe not. Committed as he was to reading the full story (1982), Jon was on stage practicing an elegant theater of cruelty in balenciaga, dior and levi's for an hour and twelve minutes. 1982--A salacious tale of power and decadence as could only be told by this mysterious agioteur. He was accompanied by another mysterious poet, clad from head to toe in Silver Fox pelts, who refused to share her name. Instead, she spoke only the three words, Worn Out Joy repeatedly in an infrasonic croon. Her name, I later found out: L. Rodriguez.

Following the reading, the gentleman poet was escorted from the premises by an entourage of no less than 14 people. Standing outside it was difficult to manage a word with the poet. But we were able to snap photos of his limited print copy of Hit Wave, compiling a bootleg simulacra of his work for the archives.

Here is one such photo, now circulating the seedy back alleys of the internet.

Anticipation

"If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be."—John Ashbery

Posthumous Works

There is talk of The Pale King. David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel. The thought of it is both tantalizing and frightening. I approach such posthumous works with serious apprehension. As is the case with Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting. I've seen the massive tome on several bookshelves, secretly willing myself to read it while fearful of the covenant I'd be entering. These works hold in them a Benjaminian aura of the author's immortality--extending a will beyond the grave.

The N over the Manhattan Bridge (from Manhattan Island into Long Island) is most exciting as it begins its ascent. I like to see the streets of Chinatown, wide and lit in neon. Cars double parked. Graffiti as evidence of some acrobatic artist. Today on the way home, I wondered about immortality. Death, like anything conceived, is a finite point. Beyond which lies our infinite.

Here is "Wiggle Room"--an excerpt from The Pale King published by the New Yorker.

-Andrew E. Colarusso