Obsidian situations
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Summary:
Tricia Middleton’s debut verse-novel brings the artist’s genius for summoning the psychic life of the object world to the page, here trading in the resonant material vocabulary that she has honed to perfection conjuring the wayward spirits of late-stage capitalism in sculptural form, for the equally resplendent wordplay of incisive observational poetry. Ostensibly set(...)
Obsidian situations
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Price:
$20.00
(available to order)
Summary:
Tricia Middleton’s debut verse-novel brings the artist’s genius for summoning the psychic life of the object world to the page, here trading in the resonant material vocabulary that she has honed to perfection conjuring the wayward spirits of late-stage capitalism in sculptural form, for the equally resplendent wordplay of incisive observational poetry. Ostensibly set in present-day Paris, ''Obsidian situations'' spans centuries, telling a story about the epigenetics of suffering, survival, and redemption in social and cultural form. Alternating between myriad personae—sometimes artist or artwork, poet or amorphous cloud—the anonymous, decidedly female, narrator that serves as our guide to the city of light channels the souls of works of art and ideas, of artists, philosophers, courtesans and, most heartrending of all, des Enfants-Trouvés through incantatory soliloquies that call to account the half-life of Enlightenment ideals propping up the soft and saggy moral economy of the L’age Anthropocentric. As a force of self-definition and a body objectified—and so subject to the same degradation as any and all things—our champion encounters ‘situations’ that are in equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, horrifying and wretched, breathtakingly beautiful, poignant, and mad. It’s a world of museums and collectors, artists and curators, lovers and mothers, daughters and others, charged with desire and repulsion, longing and rejection, death and devastation that, ironically, can only be transformed in art and in poetry and in dreams.
Literature and poetry