from Apart:
Fear has a tailwind. Fear colonizes quickly. Fear is calculating red lights and bystanders and petrol levels even now as I write you this letter upside down under the Southern Cross.
* * *
bad family’s a cancer or a cause, celebration’s inevitable denial flaunts misdeeds and even evil cleans its teeth in the mirror of not me, not my people.
[A] brilliant and relentless examination of conscience
Brian Teare
The 2016 reprint of Apart includes revised and updated Notes, which can be downloaded as a PDF under the LINKS header, below.
Apart grew out of Taylor’s memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother’s involvement in early anti-apartheid women’s groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, Apart navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief. The second edition of Apart includes extensive citations missing from the first edition. Here, 85 footnotes offer complete references for the historical, archival, and literary research included in the text. Back in print after selling out its first edition, Apart is as relevant now as when it was first published, as Hyperallergic noted:
“’After it is over, after the shooting stops, after the blood bath, after things change, after democracy, after reconciliation, after redistribution, after understanding, maybe then it will begin.’
This is how Catherine Taylor’s book Apart begins.
Picking it up now, reading that opening, three years since the book was first published, my mind immediately went to contemporary struggles for justice happening in the US today, particularly the ongoing struggles for racial justice. That centuries-old distant hope for a just future that every protester carries with them on the street — ‘maybe then it will begin.’…. Reading her text, you can’t help but get drawn into her relentless quest. The book feels like a collection of unfinished and incomplete thoughts, but ones that have purposely been left hanging. The structure is loose and undefined, mixing essay and poetry and redacted excerpts from archives, and sometimes lengthy footnotes that even in their clarifications feel uncertain.”
Catherine Taylor is the author of Apart from Ugly Duckling Presse as well as You, Me, and the Violence and Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives, which won the Lamaze International Birth Advocate Award. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press and has worked as a producer, writer, and researcher on a number of documentary films including “The Exiles,” which won an Emmy Award. She was also a Co-Founder and Producer of The Human Rights Watch Film Festival. She studied at Cornell, Oxford and Duke University (where she received her Ph.D.), and has twice been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. She teaches at Ithaca College where she is the Co-Director, along with photographer Nicholas Muellner, of the Image-Text-Ithaca MFA Program and ITI Press.
Documentary poetics can break your heart, and Catherine Taylor’s first book of poems Apart, certainly will…
Sarah Barber, The Literary Review
Catherine Taylor's Apart offers an intimate and sweeping look at the legacy of apartheid, while performing an altogether rare balance of 'lyric seduction' against 'the ugliness of corpses.' Taylor refreshingly treats white guilt and the self-conscious recognition of privilege as starting points rather than conclusions, as she plumbs the depths of history, from which, as she reminds us, 'no one is excused.' The result is edifying, original, and critically rigorous -- a poetic and political vibration between 'ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.'
Maggie Nelson
Everything begins as duality (the personal and the historical, ideas of white and ideas of black), and becomes more—even hopelessly—complex...It is not so much that everything is dual, but as Taylor eventually notes, a 'jammed hinge.' Everything remains, as the title has it, apart. In exploring the unresolvable, everything becomes a part.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
The pendulum image, from the prologue to Catherine Taylor’s Apart, could swing neatly between 'prose and verse' or between 'faith and doubt, black and white, change and stasis, self and other, amnesty and retribution . . . poverty and wealth . . . alien and citizen' in a book that investigates the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in a hybrid work that fuses the lyric, the documentary, and the memoir genres with Taylor’s scholarly inquisition, Taylor tells us that the pendulum system 'doesn’t just swing back and forth . . . inscribing simple opposites' but that 'it leaves a trail of ever-shifting ellipses.'
Pia Aliperti, NewPages
Catherine Taylor’s Apart is neither journalism nor memoir nor documentary poem nor lyric essay nor jeremiad—though it contains elements of them all—but a brilliant and relentless examination of conscience always in search of a literary form adequate to its mission. Embarked on the 'search for a common name' in the aftermath of South African Apartheid, Taylor’s takes care on her way to gather an archive of feelings, 'signs of struggle, boredom, hope, effort, fatigue, tedium, privilege, its lack, brutality, tyranny, complicity, despair, and resistance.' If Apart renders in language the affect of having an ethics, what makes Taylor’s writing ultimately so persuasive as a politics is its portrait of the private citizen as 'at once ineffectual and humane, complicit and resistant, irrelevant and necessary.' Deeply attentive to the contradictory ideologies that structure our lives as historical subjects, Taylor’s vision of conscientious citizenship demands that we recognize subjectivity’s intrinsic subjection to power without ever losing sight of our individual agency and the necessity for independent action and inquiry. Thinking its way through the insidious, tragic inequalities of globalization, capitalism, and democracy’s alleged freedoms, Apart indeed succeeds in persuading its readers to disavow 'a cynicism we can’t afford.'
Brian Teare
ISBN: 978-1-933254-96-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 160 pp, 6 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: January 01 2017
Distribution: SPD
Series: Dossier