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pdf version
January 27, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Lisa Pearson, Publisher
(310) 857-6935
Several Gravities by Keith Waldrop
Edited with an essay by Robert Seydel
$39.50 / Casebound / 112 pages / color & b/w illustrations throughout
ISBN 978-0-9799562-1-8 / Publication date: April 30, 2009
Published by Siglio Press
Keith Waldrop is "one of the most important writers, translators, and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time."
--Publishers Weekly
For nearly four decades, Keith Waldrop has been creating a body of visual art that-while mirroring his extraordinary and internationally acclaimed oeuvre of poetry, fiction and translation-has lived largely outside the public eye.
Several Gravities, the first collection of Waldrop's radiant collages, not only illuminates an essential aspect of Waldrop's work but also reveals a vivid, mesmerizing world in which the invisible, the absent, and the spaces between things are roused and rise to the surface.
In his poetry, Waldrop often purloins or salvages language from eclectic sources (religious books, novels, ticket stubs, scraps of paper, etc.), then "collages" phrases into poems at once philosophical and personal. Similarily, he captures fragments from old newspapers ads, early Renaissance paintings, comic strips, ancient maps, architectural illustrations, candy wrappers, etc. to create startlingly beautiful visual juxtapositions that delight in contradiction and ambiguity. In both poem and collage, the fragments themselves, the residue that clings to them, and the formal structures that bind them point to the condition of indeterminancy.
Waldrop's collages live somewhere between Kurt Schwitter's gorgeous abstract arrangements of detritus and Max Ernst's surreal, romantic sequences. Miniature in size but irrepressible in scope, these collages are enveloped in ghosted impressions, quiet tensions, strands of memory, and fragments of dream. Opacity and abuttments dissolve beneath layers of transparent veils. The horizon collapses in the densities of atmosphere and architecture. Silences replace declarations and incompletion persists. In Waldrop's visual constellations and accumulations, a form of language emerges, transforming the image into a poem itself.
Several Gravities features a substantial selection of collages in full color, an essay by Waldrop that enunciates the relationship between his distinctive visual and poetic practices, as well as a new, previously unpublished serial poem, "The Proof from Motion." Editor Robert Seydel also contributes an incisive essay on Waldrop's work, its expression of the poet-artist "tradition," and its expansion of the collage form.
This spring heralds three exceptional new books, providing an opportunity to consider Keith Waldrop's significant contributions to art and literature.
In addition to Several Gravities, Waldrop's much anticipated trilogy of collage poems Transcendental Studies will be released by UC Press in April, and his translation of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen will be published by Wesleyan University Press in May.
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LIMITED EDITION: A signed, numbered limited edition includes an original, miniature collage from Keith Waldrop's series Metro Tickets. $100. Click HERE for more information.
EVENTS: Currently scheduled events include a reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City, February 18, and an exhibition at the Po Gallery in Providence, RI beginning March 14. More readings and further exhibitions to be announced soon.
REVIEW COPY, PDF and/or PRESS KIT are available upon request. For more information about Several Gravities and Keith Waldrop, please visit the LIBRARY section of the Siglio website, and the SEVERAL GRAVITIES page.
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PETER GIZZI: With candles burning in devotional space and stairs leading to inked occult openings, Several Gravities brilliantly documents the "potential random" so generative to Keith Waldrop's wizardry as visual artist, prose stylist, and master poet. Whatever he compels or compels him is living, shining, astonishing.
MICHAEL PALMER: This juxtaposition of prose commentary, verse and collage is a fascinating and illuminating work in itself. Several Gravities also serves as a bright window onto the landscape of Keith Waldrop's poetics and creative life. It is suffused with his ineffable mix of gentle irony, humor and incisiveness, a tonal palette I have much admired across the decades of his deeply imaginative engagement with poetry, prose, drama, and the visual arts.
JOHANNA DRUCKER: Deft precision and rich sensuality characterize Keith Waldrop's collages. They haunt us in their evocation of what has disappeared from view but not from memory. How vividly these fragments, exquisitely excised and recombined, proffer their microcosmic scenes and complex ambiguities.
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SIGLIO is a new, independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersections of art and literature. Siglio books defy categorization and ignite conversation: they are cross-disciplinary, hybrid works that subvert paradigms, reveal unexpected connections, rethink narrative forms, and thoroughly engage a reader's imagination and intellect. Siglio publishes books without compromise -- each title embodies the inimitable vision of its author -- and we cultivate wider audiences for original, provocative work, whether by renowned, forgotten, or unknown artists and writers. We believe that challenging work can be immensely appealing: our books are beautiful, affordable, and as much a pleasure to touch and hold as they are to read.
Siglio books are available nationwide at independent booksellers, art museums and galleries, as well as on-line. For more information, click HERE.
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