The writer likes trauma.
The audience likes trauma.
The anchor that brings her to the steel bottom.
The page is the arms wrapped hungrily towards each body.
The brain withholds this knowledge just enough though a feeling lingers.
The trauma opened up is a salty wound that spreads across her hands.
The trauma opens its mouth vowels and becomes a drum.
The characters are heavy, logged with water, sand and noise.
The characters would like to drift, swim.
Story
Jennifer Firestone
December 2019
Story is a brilliant antidote to closure and the tyranny of narrative.
Brenda Coultas
There is a Story at a beach. There is a couple evolving and devolving inside a new-fangled form of the couplet. There is the landscape: the ocean, sand, and sun that language flails in trying to recreate. “The beach reached for them but slipped. / The beach shells and sound. / The beach the one syllable until soft.” Story is a cryptic film, an old photograph, a mystery, where narrative, memory, truth, and trauma are interrogated, where creditability slips much like the language that is storytelling. Where, “what is the truth but what we say.”
About the Author
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (UDP), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.
Praise
A massively ambitious and disciplined work that utilizes cinematic and novelistic technique, sometimes reminding me of Nouvelle Vague—and at other times, a rich and textured grammar of the interpersonal.
Erica Hunt
A masterful hybrid work, Story evokes and deconstructs the before, during, and after of a traumatic event. Firestone, one of our finest poetic minds, questions authorial sovereignty, memory’s reliability, the reader’s complicity, and the nature of story itself. Who owns it? Who tells it? How 'true' is it? Who (or what) is in control? 'When a story / writes itself as one is living it / how complicit are you in its fiction?' she asks. You won’t find simplistic answers here, but you will find a profound investigation of life—how we live it, how we tell it, and who we become along the way.
Laura Sims
This poetry of exquisite phrasings, open frames, and counterpoint suspends narrative time in an invention of “what happened” then and “what occurs” now. Recessed in the shadows of anticipation, earthly delights, and trauma, the real events of the telling remain seductively obscure. This is a seduction of negative space, what Knowledge loves to approach and can never answer.
Carla Harryman
Story is a brilliant antidote to closure and the tyranny of narrative. Jennifer Firestone, one of the most innovative (and smartest) poets of her generation, recounts the seconds of a traumatic event: like Zapruder’s home movie of the Kennedy motorcade, each second of narrative is a frame, slowed down, replayed in the aftermath of 'What happened?'
Brenda Coultas
Bifurcated into Firestone's slippery counterpoint and framed through an Antonioni-esque lens, a couple on a sandy vacay make up this hard-won antistory. What shape is a tale but the ouroboros of that question as it considers its dietary habits in this meditative poem's relentless and eerie turning.
Eugene Lim
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-33-6
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 144 pp, 7 x 5 in
Publication Date: December 01 2019
Distribution: Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK), SPD