Prose Architectures

by Renee Gladman (Artist)

Overview

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles

A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint. Afterword by Fred Moten.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696461
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. In addition to Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), she is the author of eight works of prose, including the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), as well as a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her most recent work of fiction Morelia is forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 fellowship from The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2016 grant to artists from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in New England with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2017
A poet visualizes the act of writing in this collection of abstract pen-and-ink drawings. In the prologue, written in part as ars poetica, Gladman (Calamities) describes a relationship with drawing that began informally and evolved into a focused investigation into thought and language. “Having had no previous training in visual art, no apparent aptitude for it, I drew from instinct,” she writes. “Or better: I drew out of the matter that was most central to my thinking and living, and that was the city.” True to this observation, the 100-plus drawings that follow evoke cityscapes and city shapes. But they resist figurative representation, instead creating richly imagined abstract spaces: “I didn’t want to draw plans but rather wanted to use the idea of plans, the suggestion of architecture, to point elsewhere: toward a different mode of being where thinking takes the shape of buildings,” Gladman writes. As these drawings echo the architecture of city skylines, they also resemble the loops and peaks of handwriting, and many of them invite viewers to squint and try to decipher meaning as with words on page. But these dynamic drawings are not to be untangled—they are to be experienced as “language dreaming of itself,” as “an inner syntax... maps or diagrams of the way the mind goes.” (June)

Publishers Weekly