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Ekphrasis has always been complicit with the presumption of who looks and at what. The poems in On the Cusp though pursue a feminist ekphrasis first through address, second through accompaniment, third through incorporation. What begins as a poetics of looking ends as one of relation where we are entangled gladly, in another's making.
—Juliana Spahr
The “original vamp” of this exquisite book, with her iron will and her infinite capacity for care and sadness, weaves the “domestic fabric” of existence “doing the work of everyday living” using every available resource, including the elegant ekphrasis of art and film and the deft “use of contradictions.” Tysh makes love exist On the Cusp of nonexistence despite (or while) “rattling the old sorrow song,” word by word, line by beautiful line, rendering the “quiet part aloud,” while rending the “dreamlike curtain or veil” “of tears” and “smoke” to reveal the “the Via Dolorosa/ you take on the way/ to being you,” “spelling paradise at the margin” both ending and extending the long continuum of the life we are in.
—Laura Moriarty
You want to know where/the image’s power resides” so come! Revel in the rotations of Chris Tysh’s three part-concept album, On the Cusp where we find ourselves beyond translation, transported to a world built on circular, smooth exchange between feminist cinema, art objets and scenes of disaster writ as dance form radioed in by one mother of us all. Be it reel or photographic reveal or the groove of Tysh’s turntable of word, here kinds of expression form together in continuous tableaux where poetics serves living as fluid connective tissue; a vehicle with which to travel “the Via Dolorosa/you take on the way/to being you.”
—Rachel Levitsky
Born and educated in Paris, Chris Tysh is the author of twelve books of poetry and drama, whose latest publications are 26 Tears (co-authored with George Tysh, BlazeVOX, 2022), Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX, 2020) and Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly, https://threefoldpress.org/current
Book Information:
· Paperback: 94 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-549-6
$18
