from The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems
Plants barely rooted are blurry with gossamer Experiment by loosening roots Shadow soil pressed down by nothing in particular By rain, rats, sparrows Or the body weight if its custodian Dripping white paint onto the exterior shell. The landlord applied glossy paint as a remedy for places attracting boot scuffs, sauce splatters, coffee spills, and dust. We used hay to discourage the horsetail and knotweed. The leggy poppies’ downy stems are some kind of antennae to feel the air Let’s pretend to read electricity, let’s retire to the crotch of a big walnut tree.
Who?
What?
Combining visuals and text, this collection of poems travels through territories as varied as daily and domestic activities; social relationships; literature, cinema, and art; as well as dreams, as it moves between the page and the exhibition.
The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object? At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails … Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multifaceted. La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.
The Eyelash and the Monochrome and Other Poems meshes conflicting modes of thinking to produce a collage of thought through the body, through the material, and through slippages of language. This collection comes out of friendship; it is for other poets, artists, or for anyone interested in ecology, communication, contradiction, displacement, subjectivity, memory, art, reading, and writing. It is comfortably uncertain, contradictory, and reflective. In defiance of order, La Melia’s haptic writing is as a riddle inquiring after our environment and our attempts to situate ourselves within our uncertain time.
When?
Arriving May 1st, 2018.
Where?
Purchase from the Talon Books website or at your local bookstore. $17.95.
How?
Moving between the page and the exhibition.
The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.
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