I spun out from Kristin’s at 8:14 against the enlivening gravelly air. Business people passed by harried and alone. Cement trucks corkscrewed past. Across Greenwich a woman exiting a cab clenched her butt. She was into herself and wore all white. Around Harrison dusty workers smoked beneath a giant blue Putzmeister crane. Why do fenced-off construction sites make me feel small, lonely and connected to the world? Skyscrapers along the New Jersey coast all looked the same color as my personal checks. One storefront rivaled Milton’s description of Chaos. Placards put Jesus in blindfold next to a blind, grinning Mao. Only after a cart filled with recyclables had passed did I realize how oblivious I’d been of its presence. Pomeranians slowed to stare at poodles across the street.
Sixty Morning Walks
Andy Fitch
November 2014
Fitch's prose is a minor miracle
Bookslut
60 Morning Walks is a sixty-part meditation inspired by Utagawa Hiroshige’s kaleidoscopically shifting vantage on the ever-changing city. The project’s companion piece, Sixty Morning Wlaks, available on the eclipse website, revisits many of the same New York locations, yet now with its language contracted out to an error-prone online transcription service. The unmediated / mediated idiom of these two halves disrupts any easy reading of the overall project as a lyrical or conceptual text.
With a Foreword by Craig Dworkin.
About the Author
Andy Fitch’s most recent books are Sixty Morning Talks and (with Amaranth Borsuk) As We Know. With Cristiana Baik, he is currently assembling the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has a collaborative book forthcoming from 1913 Press. He edits Essay Press and teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program.
Praise
All of Fitch's walks are like this, filled with quotidian moments that become minor miracles as they happen. Fitch's prose is a minor miracle in itself, playful and unaffected and determinedly joyous; his unadorned observations give grace to, and come close to reclaiming, every small event that happens daily. It's easy to believe, reading his breathless and excited accounts, that you're walking with him, that he's some kind of manic tour guide of the every day. Nothing bores him, it seems; his writing is contagious and angelic.
Bookslut
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles by Andy Fitch here
Andy Fitch in collaboration with John Cotner here
Andy Fitch interviewed in the Volta Blog
Publication Details
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 184 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: November 15 2014
Distribution: SPD
Series: Dossier