| Linen Minus | ||
| by Susan Gevirtz | ||
| 64 pages | ISBN 0-939691-07-8 | $8.00 |
"In `For A New Novel' Robbe-Grillet has written that in the sort of new writing he is proposing the author totally proclaims his need of the reader's cooperation as an `active, conscious, creative assistance.' What he asks of the reader is no longer to receive readymade a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent, in his or her turn, the work and the world and thus learn to invent one's own life. This begins to describe the process of Susan Gevirtz's work. She is a writer of great seriousness, intuition and imagination who asks you at each turn to participate in the reinvention of a language."
"Who wants? / Who walks? Who wants to walk? When is repetition a kind of answer? The word ignites. Read the work ignites. Repetition forms the answer, but what kind of answer? What kind of repetition? Gevirtz's transformations are unexpected progressions. Deliberate progressions roll internal rhyme into chords of the marvelous, into rhythmic visibility, flaunting precognition, pluralizing it. Progressions enact sensuous form, defer seams, reach unexpected grammatical conclusions. Restating progressions ritualize. Action thrills meaning among this cast of secret agents. I defy you."
"I think of Susan Gevirtz's writing in terms of the `double,' of `fetch,' -- the phantom image of a living person, as a warning or threat. The doppel-gänger, in the German; the gavar vore of the Waverly Novels. A mind that can collect enough vital energy to push a purely visual image or reflection of itself on the air -- or in this case, into a poetry haunted by its likeness to a `real' self that is itself a projection of hundreds of more or less interlocking nets of desire, language, convention and use."
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