In this Book
- The Book / Or / The Woods
- 2021
- Book
- Published by: Punctum Books
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
summary
Here is The Book / Or / The Woods, an epic song cycle that devours itself on repeat, taking cover in its own flames. We think epic in the sense of bpNichol writing Martyrology, Jabès with his books of books, Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies, Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory, Nathaniel Mackey’s long song(s), & others. We think epic with these ongoing & collected meta-serial works rather than the traditional notion of the epic as heroic nation building story, though we borrow epic tropes from Dante’s supernal underworld forest (& infernal forested underworld), sing with Sappho’s lyre, are haunted by the spirit of Homer’s katabasis, & are formed by the Popol Vuh’s wordly cosmos, which influenced us before we read it.Y the monster is alone in the woods, enclosed by a highway : a preserve. The woods are made of paper; the paper forest burns & burns. Woods & monster are endangered, pressed into service, a hazard. So is the book pressed into service, danger & endangered. The forest is deforested & reforested, dance of shadow & flame, a fantasia of ecological return, the forest (enchanted) by itself. The haunted woods. The ghosts the ghosts of what. This is the world without us. & we are here as well. Here in the forest of language.
Table of Contents
- Book II: The Book
- The Other Forest
- pp. 1-6
- Enter Character Y (A Translation)
- pp. 13-20
- Silence of the Iambs
- pp. 21-26
- The Forest of the Tree
- pp. 27-28
- Enter the Monster
- pp. 29-34
- The Monster Read
- pp. 39-44
- Or the Woods
- pp. 45-58
- The & Of The Woods
- pp. 67-72
- Crossing (The Obelus, 1 Divided)
- pp. 73-78
- Dead Forest
- pp. 79-82
- Book III: Or
- Conflagration
- pp. 1-10
- † † † (Shadows & Trees) † † †
- pp. 11-18
- Book in Shadow, Shadow in Book
- pp. 19-20
- Intermission
- pp. 21-22
- the stream & the stream
- pp. 23-26
- Book IV: The Woods
- The Forest Again Revived
- pp. 1-8
- The Clearing Forest
- pp. 9-16
- †The Stand of Ob†
- pp. 17-20
- The Farther Stand
- pp. 25-32
- Mirror Forest
- pp. 33-44
- The Forest Leaving
- pp. 45-48
- Last Passage
- pp. 65-66
- Book I: Prologue: The Book / Or / The Woods
- Book of Ruins
- pp. i-vi
- Prologue Preserve
- pp. vii-viii
- The Book Proper
- pp. ix-xiv
- Intertitle
- pp. xiii-xxvi
- Repetition with a Distance
- pp. xxvii-xxx
- Confession
- pp. xlv-xlviii
- That’s Not a Forest, It’s a Library
- pp. xlix-lii
- The Slough of Decayed Language
- pp. liii-lvi
- The Forest Revised
- pp. lvii-lviii
- Back in the Weeds
- pp. lix-lxiv
- Sentence to Forget
- pp. lxv-lxx
Additional Information
ISBN
9781953035523
Related ISBN(s)
9781953035516
MARC Record
OCLC
1256540442
Pages
310
Launched on MUSE
2021-06-16
Language
English
Open Access
Yes