TrenchArt
2011 SERIES = RECON
TrenchArt: Recon (aesthetics)
Negro marfil / Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona, translated by Jen Hofer
By Kelman Out Of Pessoa by Doug Nufer
Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents by Alex Forman
The Phonemes by Frances Richard
“Recon” for reconnaissance, recognition, a preliminary survey to gain information, an exploratory military survey of enemy territory. The Recon series writers use appropriation, constraint, and generative processes to explore new possibilities for such literary stand-bys as lyric, plot or portrait. Together, these books provide an aerial view, a survey, of ways writers are approaching this question: what does one make in, and of, the brokenness. Participating writers and artists include: Frances Richard, Doug Nufer, Jen Hofer, Renee Petropoulos, Myriam Moscona and Alex Forman.
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.spdbooks.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.
Previous TrenchArt series include:
TrenchArt Maneuvers (2010) Maneuvers explores the possibilities of re-ordered time and content framed with the understanding that one cannot separate content from time, and that to shift the form or the order is to shift the subjectivies of a text. Maneuvers series titles include: TRENCHART: MANEUVERS, aesthetics; Sonnet 56 by Paul Hoover; Not Blessed by Harold Abramowitz; The Evolutionary Revolution by Lily Hoang; The New Poetics by Mathew Timmons. Maneuvers series visual art by VD Collective.
TrenchArt Tracer (2008/09): A tracer is ammunition containing a chemical substance that leaves a trail of smoke or fire, illuminating the target for others. Each of the books in the TRENCHART: TRACER series exposes boundaries of genre—poetry is traced with prose, the prose with poetry. Rosenfield’s re: evolution is poetry-as-guidebook-for-living-and-evolution, while Carter’s A Fixed, Formal Arrangement uses the short prose form to render the liminal space of between-ness. Amina Cain’s short stories in I Go To Some Hollow explore what’s left unsaid and unseen between humans and their environments, while in a, Sophie Robinson documents the detritus of sudden loss, layering word and image, object and subject, the said with the unsayable. These tracers fire from the borders or gaps in the old original, making new literary spaces. Making TRENCHART: TRACER, the series.
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.