this is a work about what remains, what lodges in the inner eye
Cole Swensen
Afterimage
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang
November 2011
Afterimage is the testimonial of a survivor’s son. A hybrid work—part treatise, part memoir, part lyric—the text thinks through a problem prompted by confusions between the author’s imagination and his father’s history: “Do we only tell each other’s stories? Ask others to tell our own? Can we tell our own? Or is that what stories are for—to tell someone else’s, and allow another to tell yours?” With photographs by Naomi Yang.
About the Author
Damon Krukowski is the author of The Memory Theater Burned (Turtle Point) and 5000 Musical Terms (Burning Deck). Naomi Yang is a photographer and graphic designer. Together they are musicians (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500), and publishers (Exact Change).
Praise
In his elegant, lyrical prose, Krukowski records the dream logic of the nightmare that is life permanently trapped in an afterimage of war; where the impossibility of 'personal history' makes us cling all the more to subjective particulars. He takes us to locales where we don't speak the language, and conjures memories that are not ours. Or are they? In this deeply personal book about family and displacement, there is no place to rest. The past kicks out the present and the present sends letters to the future. Even writing evicts its tenants. Which is slightly paradoxical, since Krukowski is so good at it.
Jennifer Moxley
Bookended by the riotously colorful silence of Naomi Yang's photographs, this is a work about what remains, what lodges in the inner eye and inmost mind and keeps on traveling with us. With the itinerant life of a musician as backdrop, Krukowski's vivid blocks of text shift through haunted spaces—rooms, dreams, memories—in a very present grapple with the past. And all the while, the book is being written; tenuously, marvelously, it is taking place right before our eyes.
Cole Swensen
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-88-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 80 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: November 15 2011
Distribution: SPD
Series: Dossier