TrenchArt
TrenchArt Series 2008/09 = Tracer
TrenchArt Tracer Titles include:
TRENCHART: TRACER, aesthetics (wire-bound)
A Fixed, Formal Arrangement by Allison Carter (forthcoming 08/08)
re:evolution by Kim Rosenfield (forthcoming 10/08)
I Go To Some Hollow by Amina Cain (forthcoming 01/09)
a by Sophie Robinson (forthcoming 03/09)
TrenchArt Tracer Visual Artists: Susan Simpson and Ken Ehrlich
About TrenchArt: TrenchArt is an annual subscription series of innovative literature and poetics. Each TrenchArt series includes two poets and two prose writers whose work the Press situates within a larger discussion of contemporary aesthetics. Each series also incorporates works by contemporary visual artists representing additional aesthetic explorations. By publishing individual titles as part of an annual series, the Press presents work in cultural conversation; to advance this exchange, all participants write an aesthetic essay or poetics, which is separately published as the series’ leading title. Each individually authored title includes an Introduction by a critic or another writer, thus providing another layer of critical engagement.
Single-author TrenchArt titles are available for $15 (US) from Small Press Distribution (www.sbdbooks.org) or Les Figues Press (www.lesfigues.com).
The complete current TrenchArt series is available from Les Figues with a $60 Subscription Membership (US & Canada; all others $85). Subscribing members receive all five books in the mail as they are published, along with regular updates on the Press, and Press events.
Past TrenchArt series [Material, Casements, Parapet] can be purchased as a $60 box-set, while supplies last.
Previous TrenchArt series include:
TrenchArt Parapet (2007/08): A book is two languages in one bind. Or, as Vanessa Place says in “Cups & Mutts, an Introduction” to TRENCHART: PARAPET: “The pieces in this series resemble themselves and their opposites, which are sometimes one another, and sometimes themselves again. The self-negation that circles around Ifland (Voice of Ice) and Apps (God's Livestock Policy) finds its counterweight in the god-act of creation celebrated by Adair (visual art) and Taylor (Chop Shop), and the shadowed part of this Venn diagram is joyously occupied by Thormhälen (A Happy Man and Other Stories), who is his own Adam, tasting of the apple and pronouncing it picaresque. [...] We cannot help our walls. They give us something to raise and raze, to scale over and stand beside, one side or the other, it doesn’t really matter. The point is the parapet and the brazen trumpet of our own sweet making.”
TrenchArt Casements Series (2006/07): What is a window, but a frame arbitrarily placed in a space of unlimited possibility. The writers in the TRENCHART: CASEMENTS series survey the fields of language and form and set a constraint—a window—to contain and order the chaos. Christine Wertheim of the society for cUm|n’ linguistics presents part of its ongoing poetic enquiry into the structures of language, discovering fresh systems of meaning in a specific set of English graphemes (+|'me'S-pace). Dachy’s frame is the slide, set in a show, imaging the psychic pathos of Western culture (Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World). The two plays by Sissy Boyd maintain their spare posture despite time’s entropy; systems fail even as form holds (in the plain turn of the body make a sentence). Finally, Archer’s haiku breaks through the window and across the form’s frame to turn and look back at the view from the other side (Inch Aeons).
TrenchArt Material Series (2005/06): Each of the titles in the TRENCHART : MATERIAL series backstitches canonical Western literature into a contemporary American text. These books integrate traditional literary forms—the war story, the nature poem, the folk story, the fairy tale—into new work that resurrects human relevance while pushing their chosen containers even further. From Place’s war story rifled into a tense-filled, single sentence (Dies: A Sentence), to Ore’s nature poems pacing within human-built zoos and human-adapted language (Grammar Of The Cage); from Carmody’s stories of Biblical folk in the middle-spread of America (Requiem) to Calkins’ fairy-tale forest of modern medicine (A Story of Witchery), history becomes presently important, and the literary (and ecumenical) canon fodder for cultural retooling and retelling.