Search results for ""Author Catherine Wagner""

Place History and the Archive provides a forty-year survey of Catherine Wagner’s photographic work. This is the first volume to contain Wagner’s major bodies of work, dating from 1974 to 2016, in one compelling publication. Wagner’s incisive photographs move seamlessly and elegantly between different approaches and content following her interest in the ways in which knowledge is transferred. This expansive new publication surveys nineteen series and includes early projects in which Wagner began working with strategies she calls “archeology in reverse”. Early California Landscape (1974), Moscone Site (1978), and 1275 Minnesota Street (2016) employ a strategy of considered observation that interrogates the built environment. Physical and cultural architecture along with its core materials, are reimagined as metaphors for how we construct our cultural identities. Wagner further extends the notion of construction as she examines institutions as various as art museums, science labs, classrooms, the home, and Disneyland. Scientific, cultural, and natural histories are key realms of this exploration. At several Human Genome Project sites, Wagner explored scientific inquiry; while at the Stanford Linear Accelerator she worked on a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Projects such as Re-Classifying History (2005), Rome Works (2014), and A Narrative History of the Light Bulb (2006), recontextualize archives and collections of various cultural and historical institutions; questioning the representations of how history is recorded. Reparations (2010), and Trans/literate (2013) investigate the processes of cultural change and redefinition by looking at collections of medical splints and Braille books, respectively.

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With her third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, 'diligent and strict'. A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of the body as container, while the obligation to include others in one's apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner's slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. 'Things mean, and I can't tell them not to'. What's going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites Eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy - the desire for a debased object - and the politics thereof: 'Well I expect you to go into the/fucking human tunnel/I'm going'. Here, we find a female body marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.

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In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism."Wagner's fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens. . . . Wagner contrasts these complicated poems with short, clean, pieces that offer a kind of breathing space for the reader. Not to be mistaken for trivial, the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner’s collection."—Publishers Weekly"Taking with one hand what they give with the other, Wagner's poems are full of vehemence and disdain and tenderness and somewhere, in some inexpugnable part of the body of language through which so many discomforting feelings pass, a thorny kind of joy. This is my idea of great poetry: in which 'The actual is / flickering a binary / between word and not-word.'"—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic"Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing."—Jennifer Moxley"Nervous Device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner's poems."—Eleni Sikelianos"The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivty: sexy, poignant, knowing. And the poems here make me feel possible."—Hoa Nguyen"Wagner's poems contain multitudes, at once overflowing with seductive lyricism only to suddenly shift into brash fragmentation. She is informed, but the word subjective has no place whatsoever in her work. As the cover suggests, the potential for human connection is downright erotic for Wagner."Alexis Coe, SF Weekly"The notion that the audience is 'putting [their] finger in [her] vagina' while reading Nervous Device signals one of Wagner's primary thematic concerns in the collection: the complex relationship between poetry, sex, desire, and the body."—Joshua Ware"Wagner is to be lauded, first and foremost, for her daring, her conceptual eclecticism, and her linguistic range. . . . Nervous Device is a clear-eyed and brave testament to the changing currents of a poet's life."—Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post" . . . the manner in which Wagner structures the language through repetitive dialogue both builds meaning and breaks it apart. . . . Wagner balances disjunction and lucidity, private and public, distant and (riskily) up-close."—Jessica Comola, HTML Giant

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The experiences of motherhood are not to be met with silence and/or platitudes. This anthology brings to light the many strong, scary, gorgeous motherhood poems being written right now - poems that address the politics and difficulties and stubborn satisfactions of mothering - while it reminds us of earlier poems that opened the space in which this new work might appear. Motherhood is a universal solvent: Contributors to this anthology come from all over the aesthetic map, and from different states of childgetting - adoption, single parenthood, new mothers, mothers of adults. "Not for Mothers Only" will abolish any comfortable prejudices about what poems on motherhood can or cannot do or say.

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From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, this collection troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life.

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