Places and peoples: general and pictorial works Books

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisA poetry chapbook that reflects on shifting time and tides through the language of the shoreline. Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral. McCarthy's extraordinary tides is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.Trade Review“McCarthy’s extraordinary tides gorgeously breathes the back and forth of water and liminal space but also racks serious balls. Bishop’s verse that says where the land meets the sea is ‘literature’—here this idea finds a brittle, punctuated alphabet made of the things collected: oyster comma, gentle cloud commas. Simultaneously, McCarthy sees the world through the maintenance and survival of her own body, a witch’s circle, and from her observations can build entire days, and entire beings: ‘We hold a useless language on our tongues, and it becomes useful.’” -- Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of The Betweens“I was first drawn to extraordinary tides by the beauty and strangeness of its language. Strange compound words (some neologisms, some not) such as ‘wrackline,’ ‘boyfull,’ ‘holdfast,’ ‘distelfink,’ ‘bladderwrack,’ and ‘seastruck’ seem temporarily agglomerated like the kelp and shells mixed in the latest high tide’s wrackline. This book is a study of flux in the shape of sea and sky. . . . It is the tension between tenuous solidity and flood that makes this work so beautiful and moving.” -- Rae Armantrout, judge for the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest and author of Conjure“Tides churn, birds gyre, twilight turns to night and back to day. ‘It’s the end of the world but / which world,’ these poems ask, pointing to all that cycles back. Extraordinary tides attends to the ‘smallest stop in the relentless / present tense,’ to motion and stasis, to change and continuation. At the edge of the sea, holes in socks, salt in hair, these poems ‘write the paragraph of our place // again and again.’” -- Sarah Dowling, author of Entering Sappho“McCarthy brings the waterfront into our lexicon, asking the literary to kiss the littoral, where the archaic is made present, and the present is made historic when channeled through her vigilant ear and euphonic voice. In poems written at the wrackline—the vein where the ocean tongues the land—and in a time when the world thrashed and foamed in quarantine, McCarthy’s coastal almanac helps us imagine what of the sea resists being bought and sold as a boardwalk sensation (then) and Instagram documentation (now). ‘tradition says clams are common property & the flats unleasable’ writes McCarthy, in characteristically buoyant, full-throated verses of beguiling calm and razor-brisk wit. Reading extraordinary tides in these extraordinary times (to which Old English denotation the title hearkens), I am better anchored to observe what remains common amongst the species at the shore who insist that we can, still, ‘eke the ebb of it.’ If the tides are the intercessional prayers that sustain a cosmological love between the moon and our planet, then McCarthy becomes, in this book, the trusty translator of those abiding novenas.” -- Divya Victor, the author of CURB"There is something fascinating about the shift in Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s lyric across her sleek new collection, extraordinary tides, a book that follows on the heels of her six prior full-length collection." * rob mclennan's blog *

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Book SynopsisA collection by award-winning poet Kimberly Reyes that explores erased histories. Through her latest collection, Kimberly Reyes navigates the physical, hereditary, and liminal worlds between land, time, and memory. The poems in vanishing point. take us to San Francisco, Ireland, and the Atlantic Ocean, reclaiming and examining contested space as the poet seeks to revive left-behind histories, reconsider what we see, and reveal what we cannot see. Trade Review"An unflinching collection of poems from a bold literary voice." * Kirkus *"This intelligent exploration intertwines intimacy and testimony. Drawing on visual works from the public domain and embedding QR codes linking to Reyes’s film poems, hybridity is at the core of this collection." * Harriet Books *"It’s easy enough to experiment for experiment’s sake, but in vanishing point. (the period at the end of the title is very much intentional) Reyes’s assays beyond traditional poetry-making are clearly in service of a larger goal, the re-creation and repudiation of history’s injustices. vanishing point. includes color FBI sketches and black and white etchings, and three times in the book, you turn the page to find a QR code that takes you to a video poem on YouTube. Reyes also makes extensive use of dark and light gray to emphasize irony and erasure, so that readers must strain their eyes to recover text that has been or is being expunged from the historical record. Additionally, her many residences and fellowships, including a Fulbright in Ireland, enrich the book’s already bountiful content." * California Review of Books, on "31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023" *"Spanning New York, Puerto Rico, Ireland, and beyond, Black Nuyorican poet Reyes brings together census records, FBI sketches, and QR codes to the author’s poetry films into a meditation on the limits of visibility." * The Latinx Project *"[vanishing point] was composed, as [Reyes'] author biography offers, 'while splitting her time between San Francisco, Ireland, and her hometown of New York City,' feeling out an articulation of layerings of a cultural sense of between-ness, including her connection to multiple points but not feeling entirely at home in any one. Her writing is staccato, precise . . . Reyes works to write her way back into view, or to write enough to be seen, before she completely disappears." * Rob McLennan *“Reyes insists that we remember the histories and identities erased by the work of empire and patriarchy. Traversing continents, oceans, and historical eras, Reyes utilizes archive, video poems, séance, and an unrelenting lens that refuses ‘a cozy invisibility.’ This collection affirms the need to preserve histories on the precipice of being consumed and forgotten. Through the visual use of gradient text, Reyes amplifies and conjures what is at risk of being sent into the silence of white noise. Be it in California, Ireland, Puerto Rico, or popular culture, Reyes calls our attention to the ‘ivory-stroked / false purity—’ and the ‘misappropriation // of American gothic / how blackness sits / unbound // darkest places unimaged.’ Amid all the weight, there is a tender cradling of the lyric that re-animates a sense of home and a refusal to be displaced: ‘we are still / we are memory.’ Vanishing point is rich in language and it is a gift to follow Reyes as she delves into what must be known and what must be spoken to sculpt and imagine a new cartography.” -- Anthony Cody, author of The Rendering“Vanishing point suggests a disappearance, and the print does occasionally fade from black to gray, yet the poems in this book present a vivid original presence by means of adroit language, strong emotion, imaginative leaps. It is a unique work, wide-ranging, heart-rending—attuned to the multiple forms of who one is, black and certainly blue. But also multiple and nuanced in the twists and turns of lines, sound, spacing, vocabulary—a complexity that is can’t help but rattle and move the reader. The poems are wonderfully attentive to rhythm, even as they include QR codes, documents, quotations, and the words of others, for example, Fred Moten, The Talking Heads, Kara Walker, Richard Wright, Sinéad O’Connor, those echoed words in gray. Vanishing point raises the significant questions of where one belongs and who one is, but it is also a book of tenderness and compassion for the larger world where destruction exists in history, around every corner, for those who pick grapes, for black women, for race horses, for birds.” -- Martha Ronk, author of The Place One Is“Kimberly Reyes has written an innovative and magnetic book. Each poem spirals beautifully by itself but when I finished reading, I realized I had encountered and entered new architecture. Here, thinking radiates to illuminate the ‘absorbing ghosts’ of the self and the familial and the ‘living shadows’ of oppressive historical forces. Here, the language is lyrical, layered, and spectral. Here, the ‘hyphen is a rejection of negative space.’ Reyes is an astonishingly gifted poet and this book enlarges and complicates what the page can hold back, reveal.” -- Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine"Kimberly Reyes' latest collection vanishing point. contains hauntings within the text, echoes in the graphics. There are diagrams and QR codes, landscape and demographics that impress upon readers the emptiness from missing—that map of dispossessions, the collapse of stars—and the fullness of looking, of looking closer. Here, people faced with survival keep looking back and up and through disaster to ask: Who are the living? or: What does it feel like? and: Is this pleasure? This is a thoughtful, serious exploration of expirations and hollows, stains and swells, the soil salted over blood, flame, memory." -- Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden"vanishing point. ranges effortlessly over epochs, oceans, continents, casting a wryly compassionate, implacable eye on North America, Southern Ireland, and the complex histories that bind them. It consolidates one of the freshest, most searching voices on either side of the Atlantic." -- Billy Ramsell, author of The Architect’s Dream of Winter

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