To enter the realm of writing one must take one’s self to divorce court. I’m sorry it has to be this way. The re-education of my working eye winks. To enter the realm of writing is to suffer losses. Run off other sufferers, run off. I wanted to but could not say run off.
Utopia Pipe Dream Memory
Anna Gurton-Wachter
December 2019
Anna’s capacity for a theatrics of iconoclastic reverie is in a league of its own.
Brenda Iijima
Utopia Pipe Dream Memory builds upon impossible imagined intimacies, relishing the pleasure of slow, attentive learning. In an unfolding of rhythms, repetitions, and distended narratives it envisions a space of play and ecstatic influence, drawing characters such as Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer and Maya Deren into dialogues and visions that articulate the tension between embodiment and voice, identification and materiality. These narratives push towards a unified dispersal, a complex act of exultant feminine chaos, letting slip the boundaries between what is animal, what is describable, and what can be made to appear.
About the Author
Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (UDP) is her first full-length collection and her chapbooks include Mother of All (Above/Ground Press), The Abundance Chamber Works Alone (Essay Press), Blank Blank Blues (Horse Less Press), and CYRUS (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Other work has appeared in PELT’s Feminist Temporalities, No Dear, 6×6, Elderly and elsewhere. Anna edits and makes books with DoubleCross Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, a few blocks from the building in which she was born.
Praise
Utopia Pipe Dream Memory is a plethora of wonder and exuberance. Anna Gurton-Wachter, “in her woman treasure form” has conjured a lush and evocative new wave of feminist thinking where subject and object are erotic enablers and the spell cast by narration is our ecological surround redoubled, brimming with potent and unbounded fascination. She rethinks from inside the juggernaut what a sociology of the imagination can look like. I adore the perverse transparency of mesmerizing similitudes and divergences that tug at each other, at perception and at the reader’s third eye, fixated on desire’s embodied visions. Anna’s capacity for a theatrics of iconoclastic reverie is in a league of its own.
Brenda Iijima
It is ‘an opiate image’ doing the writing, and other consciousnesses overtake the poet too, the cartoonist’s hand cartoonishly visible, the mind ‘so open the listener’s whole attention seeps back’. It’s like Rosmarie Waldrop’s version of Wittgenstein, where the Lady of Thought divides herself into being, and she is Gertrude Stein having-passed-through-Gertrude-Stein, delivering the news, which is that ‘every word is a nipple.’ And that it’s hard to tell the singer from the song. Utopia Pipe Dream Memory finds us at a banquet of the greatest goddesses of poetry, those poets who vibrate the telluric current of the world, which like the flower when it feels the buzzing of the bee, sweetens its nectar
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
What if Dante were a woman alive on earth in the age of the corpse flower livecam? What if the great women of the avant-garde appeared, like Virgil, to lead her through an underworld that is this world, composed of late-night YouTube binges, feminist reading groups, and homeless poets? Surely the result would be Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, Anna Gurton-Wachter’s dizzying first book. Gurton-Wachter’s attention is profound and wayward, indexing the peculiarities of our present moment for unknowable futures. This is a book of impossible intimacies hovering, in which your favorite writer may appear as both a body and an immaterial being to whisper encouragement in your ear. Anna knows that language is a shifting and dangerous ground, that to enter the realm of writing is to suffer losses, but/and here she is, practicing animal ways of knowing, welcoming us to see and feel our way across what space if any we have left.
MC Hyland
In the News
Links
Anna Gurton-Wachter’s Poet-of-the-week page on Brooklyn Poets
Anna Gurton-Wachter Readings on Greetings Readings
Anna Gurton-Wachter’s The Abundance Chamber Works Alone Reviewed by Rob McLlennan
“Poem From Hypnosis” published & commented on at Poetry Society of America
Excerpts from Utopia Pipe Dream Memory online at Verse
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-31-2
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 144 pp, 5.75 x 7.25 in
Publication Date: December 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Coach House Books via Publishers Group Canada (Canada), Inpress Books (UK)