The girl tells you she wants boys who are pedicured, trimmed, and close shaven. She wants somebody who is not French but has French attributes. She says, “I’ve heard it said that willow grubs fall from willow trees. I’ve heard it said that nostalgia is just an excuse to linger in the past tense.”
We Used to Be Everywhere
Craig Foltz
October 2013
it’s a kind of meditation, a trip through a landscape with people and things
David Antin
Assembled from soundbytes, lists, landscapes, and found objects, Craig Foltz’s writing chases the day to day lives of our contemporaries down absurdist avenues. Imagine a world where words pass through walls; where the banal and the analytic co-exist on delicate, but sturdy tethers. Wry, beguiling, and evocative, We Used to Be Everywhere provides a transcript for the post-language milieu.
In 2018, we offer this title along with Coming Up for Air, a special hand-made edition of Craig Foltz’s prose and Shelton Walsmith’s drawings produced by Loudmouth Collective in 2001. See here for more information.
About the Author
Craig Foltz is a writer and multi-media artist whose work has appeared in numerous journals, galleries, and performance spaces in both hemispheres. His collection of poetry postcards, The States, was released by UDP in 2007, and a collection of his fiction, We Used to Be Everywhere, was published by UDP in Fall 2013. He also published two chapbooks (“The BBQ Killers” and “Coming Up For Air”) on the now famously hard-to-spot Loudmouth Collective. He lives on the slopes of a dormant volcano in New Zealand where the progeny from Kahikatea will always be king.
Praise
A series of sentences that want to be a story or have escaped from a story. With a cast of characters and a careless ocean. ^^The sentences are freshly grammatical, many unheard of before. You will hear about them again and again. It’s a kind of meditation, a trip through a landscape with people and things.
David Antin
Like an instruction manual on the uses of a new metal that makes one dream of Guadalajara, Craig Foltz has written a book that includes everything: Approximations! Abstractions! Aesthetics! A light, wispy breeze passing through the syntactic torque of his prose is sure to set off the tornado sirens.
Noah Eli Gordon
Craig Foltz peers into the chasm between knowing & wording. His poems & stories make me laugh without understanding where the joke is, why the joke makes me fall apart, & how it differs from stone. Immersive & addictive, Foltz's writing is very very very good writing.
Mathias Svalina
Craig Foltz’s positioning of [writing] as landscape in a way that unsettles the idea of “the landscape” in much the same way that Stein’s portraits interrogated the meaning of a “portrait” and the relationship of that concept to language.
Nicholas Grider
In the News
Links
The States (UDP, 2007)
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-17-9
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 112 pp, 4.375 x 7.125 in
Publication Date: October 01 2013
Distribution: SPD