Gazing Down On It

Lauren de Sá Naylor

ESSAY, FEMINISM, POETRY  |  $12 $10.8

October 2022
Read an excerpt

He climbs the steps I only now notice from the bed; a door painted white is propped-up with shoes glued on in staggered formation, sideways. I notice high top trainers and some fabulous white leather-upper black platforms that look super comfy & very art curator! He ascends & is imperceptible for some time. I survey the whitewashed space & her presence briefly. He descends dressed in wide pants & a matching bandeau top, shoulders & arms draped in a sheer organza blouse, open of course, & he flounces out of sight.

In the other dream a group has to travel on a dinghy from solid ground to a clay/mud mound hither. It can be seen in the middle distance, a brown, seemingly unoccupied mass dredged out of a body of water. The ground is uneven and prone to slashing and deflating the dinghy (cleaving it like other forms of intimate proximity). And there is no water to speak of or to contextualise the necessity of a sailing vessel.

It's an epic prose poem, about things that cannot be reduced from their complexity.

SJ Fowler

Gazing Down On It is a collection of dream narratives, of language as weapon or prayer, compiled in the plague year of 2020.

These fragments iterate a pervasive concern with embodiment in relation to others, boundaries and their transgression, and the shifting/slipping quality of ‘roles’ and ‘identities’ such as wife, mother, daughter, parent, queer, artist, witch and especially, woman (all terms that discomfort).

About the Author

Lauren de Sá Naylor writes prose/poetry from the mythopoetics of autobiographical rumination, oneiromancy, and biophilia. She makes film/audio collage—interactive layers of electronic sound, field recordings, and voice—to think through subjectivity, relation, and embodiment. Throughout the 00’s she published and distributed Pretend I am Someone Else zine, and continues to self-publish, most recently ONANIA: a book of dreams. My Dance the Skull, If a Leaf Falls Press, 3am, Hotel, Eros, & Gorse have published her essays, poetry, and prose. She received an MA from the University of Leeds and has taught Critical & Cultural Theory. She lives in a semi-rural post-industrial town in the UK’s North, where she is ¼ of a collective/artist-run bar.

Praise



Praise for Previous Work

It's an epic prose poem, about things that cannot be reduced from their complexity.

SJ Fowler

Publication Details

Chapbook
Publication Date: October 01 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)