Adam Cannot Be Adam

by Kelli Anne Noftle

Overview

Adam Cannot Be Adam is a text of constantly refracting mirrors providing us with insights beyond mere duality. These deft, inquisitive poems portray two Adams as external characters in an ever-shifting mythos while examining the inner double personae locked in self-confrontation. Kelli Anne Noftle offers kaleidoscopic perceptions of reality using diagrams, mirrors, photography, holograms and painting. The simplicity of Noftle’s language often belies what is exposed, endlessly folding to create new structures from quotidian material. Adam Cannot Be Adam is a holographic portrait of identity and intimacy; each poem reveals an alternate view of the whole, questioning normative ideas about our relationship to self and other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632430335
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

KELLI ANNE NOFTLE is a visual artist, musician, poet, and business manager who divides her time between Los Angeles and San Diego. Poems and music can be found at www.kelliannenoftle.com.

Table of Contents

“It is, of course, true that the two “For a time I did not make” “I knew him as intimately” “Today everything exists” “A story requires resemblance” Notes Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Molly Brodak

“Kelli Anne Noftle’s second collection of poems reveals a brilliant mind observing a shifting subject, the ‘holographic man,’ doubled in memory’s mirror and in the magical distance of love. Finely wrought and restlessly inquisitive, the poems hover over the point where intimacy ‘converges with light’ in the mind, tinkering with perception, optical illusions, and visual imagery. Noftle’s poems are like origami animals, new shapes folded out of the ordinary material of life, offering the reader a transcendent guidebook on ‘how to see/ a picture/ made of uncountable / refractions.’”

Editorial Reviews

Adam Cannot Be Adam, Kelli Anne Noftle’s “quixotic and visionary” second book unfolds and unfolds a fresh consciousness out of her personally mythologized logic. Inside a linguistic “circle of white noise” where the double bind, the double personae of the self resides, you’ll find a lively physics of invention. Noftle’s dream play of this “story” of two Adams echoes Valery’s philosophical mix between seeing and forgetting/remembering, between apples and oranges, between “thirst and indifference.” The book’s declarative stance offers us a stunning variation on the normative pose of speaking agency. Noftle’s unique diction is the perfect habitat to breed her wild visual taxonomy. It is a work of art, interrupted by light –– a luminous “engine to a doppelganger,” a desolation of beauty blown in on the paradox of the future.”—Elena Karina Byrne, author of Squander


“William James tells us that “We ought to say a feeling of and…quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.” If Adam Cannot be Adam, then Kelli Anne Noftle shows us the middle way, the difficult liminal space that exists between Adam and Adam, and the feeling that necessitates such a space. There is Adam the idea, Adam the name, and Adam the first man. “Which Adam is the original / which Adam is behind the curtain / which Adam is the one I am pointing to,” Noftle asks. The questions Noftle here tangles with, however, are never so simple as to reveal the wizard behind the curtain, except that they do reveal the system of which that wizard is a function. This book-length work cuts through the patriarchal structures of love, sex, and religion to remind us that the sense of self is contingent upon the sense of other. Adam Cannot be Adam without the woman—the first, the poet, Kelli Anne Noftle—who makes him so.”
—James Meetze, author of Phantom Hour and Dayglo


“This book pairs the schism of two different biblical stories alongside the schism of two Adams within Noftle’s own life, and her subsequent desire to bring these multiplicities into a single, focused image. When one reads Noftle’s poetry, one is allowed to share in the building of a perspective that cleaves the world, simultaneously seeing everything double and coalesce. Noftle speaks her dream-worlds into a unified manifested creation.”
—Andrew Wessels, Tarpaulin Sky


“The whole book is made of voices. There are volunteers, settlers, people who don’t understand migrants, migrants....emblematic voices that represent the migration crisis.I wanted to burst out of my own bubble, because I live in a very beautiful, secluded place with lakes and mountains and that sometimes leads to complacency. . . . detached from the humanity at its core. So in [a] sense, that’s what I was hoping for myself and for the readers [of Of Annunciations]—to enter into the core humanity and we all can offer in a way we know how. My small daily struggle for the refugees was to write about them.”—Ewa Chrusciel, NHPR The Bookshelf


“Finely wrought and restlessly inquisitive, the poems hover over the point where intimacy “converges with light” in the mind, tinkering with perception, optical illusions, and visual imagery. Noftle’s poems are like origami animals, new shapes folded out of the ordinary material of life, offering the reader a transcendent guidebook on “how to see/ a picture/ made of uncountable/ refractions.”—Entropy

From the Publisher