ISBN:
9780889226043
Pages: 108 pp
Pub. Date:
May 21 2009
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.3125"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE011000
Adeena Karasick’s startling and arresting work constantly de-contextualizes and re-contextualizes language: its signs, signifiers, images, ideograms, pictograms, lexicography and syntax. In doing so, it leads us into the subliminal, where it foregrounds memories, associations, archetypes, metaphors and other elements of the subconscious usually well and deeply suppressed in the communications we construct to repress as much as we reveal in our conversations of the everyday. This constant rupture of desire, of language struggling against its bonds and restraints, literally in spite of itself, is what becomes both visceral and palpable in an encounter with Karasick’s images as they turn into texts, and texts into images.
Karasick’s work first encounters, then reveals, and finally resists the growing cornucopia of privatized fear—the increasingly ubiquitous metanarrative of the public space that surrounds us—in the iconography of safety manuals, the illusions of choice represented and delimited by menus in both the digital and the analogue world of “messaging,” the increasingly circumscribed and xenophobic discourse of politics and public policy, and the barbed-wire garrisons we found with our constructs of identity.
Mashing up the lexicon of war with post-industrial consumerism, haute cuisine, couture, language, Eros and desire, Karasick’s sixth book serves up a linguistic onslaught of plastic explosives. Whether exploring commas as the mistresses of language, rules of textual engagement read through systems of courtship, a love song to Osama bin Laden, or a sassy send-up of Hollywood Kabbalah, Amuse Bouche is at once dark and satirical, exuberant and amorously rigourous—it will make your body politic tremble, your head spin and your mouth water. Her Katyusha-garnished, encrusted margins will leave you salivating long after the bomb, that ever-present yet elusive threat of instantaneous deconstruction, has dropped into our moveable feast, and silenced the babble of tongues our global discourse has become.
Joint winner 2009 One of the Best Books of 2009 (About.com)
Adeena Karasick is a media artist, performer, cultural theorist, and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Karasick is also co-founding Artistic Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. In 2017 the Adeena Karasick Archive was established at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Her writing is marked with an urban, Jewish, and feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production and blurs the lines between popular culture and scholarly discourse. It has been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), and noted for its “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), its “twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin).
Karasick’s most recent publications are Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, 2017), a Jewish-feminist revisiting of the Biblical story of Salomé, and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014).
Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide, participated in international conferences, telepoetic colloquia, and literary festivals. She regularly publishes articles, reviews, and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural/semiotic theory. She also produces videopoems and sound recordings of her work, which highlight its radical performativity (find them on YouTube), and she was also featured on the TV series Heart of a Poet, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV.
More information on Karasick and and her work can be found on adeenakarasick.com