neither wit nor gold (from then)
April 2011
neither wit nor gold (from then)
Original price was: $14.00.$12.60Current price is: $12.60.
"His books are a tool for liberation."
— Peter Lamborn Wilson
About the Book
While putting together a manuscript of work written between 1975-1990, Alcalay became dissatisfied with the notion of a “selected poems.” As a response, he began to comb through photographs, correspondence, memorabilia, journal entries, and newspaper clippings from the era, and incorporated them into his book; the result is a personal investigation into the relationships of context to text, memory to nostalgia, and present attention to the multiple traces of the past.
Author
Praise
Ammiel Alcalay is that rare thing—a gifted prose writer and poet, an accomplished intellectual and a true, as well as inventive, comparatist.
— Edward Said
His books are a tool for liberation.
— Peter Lamborn Wilson
He approaches his experience as if it were somebody else’s. He takes h
is own poetry, his own notebooks, and his own diaries as documentary evidence of another person’s
life and therefore presents them as the index of a different, never-quite-forgotten world.
— David Kaufmann, The Tablet
Alcalay is at his most telling when he poses the possibilities of these counter-collaged memories meeting and creating another kind of consciousness, a third eye on a distant landscape coming into zoom focus, or, like Jack Spicer’s poet as radio, radiating poems as messages (radio waves)coming in at different frequencies, frequenting multiple dimensions.
— Benjamin Hollander
What the format and the content lays out is a life, filled with poetry and music, work, frenzy, scribbles, reportage and so much more. There’s a great narratological power in the fact that the book’s point of entry is not the first page, but any page.
— Jake Marmer
[E]xamination of Professor Alcalay’s work reveals the fascinatingly creative ways in which personal photographs, archival images are used to recover memories, provoke ideas and illuminate imaginations.
— Spinning Head blog