Epigraphs

Rebecca Letters

Whenever an order for a coffin came, Hazel went to tell the bees who was dead

                                                                                                                             Mary Webb

The Agency of Wind


Would now the wind had but a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.

                                                                                                   Herman Melville
                                                                                                                                                                           
Acts of Levitation

One can own a mirror/does one then own the reflections/that may be seen in it?

                                                                                                 Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Mermaid's Purse 

 Because my memory is undergoing a sea-change. Though I am certain I remember, I am no long sure what it is I remember nor, indeed, the reason I should remember it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Angela Carter

The Scented Fox 

Its remoteness from the center of things is what is enduring about a Tale and it doesn't tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about. 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Barbara Guest


For the spiral-walker there is no plain path, no up and down, no inside or outside. But there are strange returns and recognitions and never a conclusion.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Fanny Howe


Each word itself is an arrangement/The story must exist in each word or it cannot go on

                                                                                                                                       Louis Zukofsky


The imund book is the book without an author…  

                                                              Héléne Cixous 


The Desires of Letters 

Will the days watch us like chapters, will it be heading toward another season, is a story from a dream because I must relate it. I feel impelled to 

and I want my family to both return and advance in time. 

                                                                          Bernadette Mayer

Roseate, Points of Gold 

...into a roseate dawn that in order to construct itself progressively before me this unknown universe was drawn from silence and from night.                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                               Marcel Proust

The Ivory Hour


We must for dear life make our own counter-realities
               
                                                                          Henry James


What is the weight of light?

                   Clarice Lispector


Why should I abandon my ancient love/inherited from earlier births?

                                                                                                                Mira Bai

Lost Parkour Ps(alms) 

The place we are going is the place/we were before we were born

                                                                                                Joanne Kyger

Scorpyn Odes 

Their heads touch the sky, their terror is awesome and their glance is death. 

                                                                                                                       Gilgamesh


A mind that broods over guilty woes is like a scorpion girt by fire 

                                                                                                          Shelley


The Scorpion is an uncommunicative creature, secret in his practices and disagreeable to deal with, so that his history, apart from anatomical detail, amounts to little or nothing                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Fabre

P R A C T I C E 

You cannot fold a Flood—/And put it in a Drawer---/Because the Winds would find it out---/And tell your Cedar Floor--

                                                                                                                                                           Emily Dickinson


Where else would you start to drown and suddenly be in a new body? Where else would you see the meagerness of your own expression as a corpse? 

Where else might you be a torso, beating at your own window? 

                                                                                                Alice Notley


Kierkegaard says knowledge proceeds every act but surely there are acts that are not proceeded by knowledge. 

Repetitions pass at the front door from summer to winter. Some slowly. Some quickly. Total strangers. 

Never saw them before. Can't picture them now. Umbrellas—strange totalities—upheld, wheeling.    

                                                                                                                                                            Lyn Hejinian


Does absence occupy time, is absence a new moment? Does it have its own sort of presence?

                                                                                                                                            Norman Fischer


They threaten to throw into the air their own aura that becomes a ghost.

                                                                                                       Clarice Lispector
 

You Envelop Me 

And I am walking in her garments

In rooms made of pollen and chance and noise

Towards the errors in humanism

                                  Lisa Robertson


Periodic Companions

Implicit is the hypothesis that all atoms of a given element behave in exactly the same way, irrespective of place and epoch. 

                       Rosmarie Waldrop


I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions.

                                                            Primo Levi


                                                                                  with tender purloined sunlight

at winter's lip

   Lisa Jarnot 

We are all semaphores for each other

                                   Inger Christensen


Born parenthetical subjects of a myopic regime, we strived to represent an unspoken sensibility, a nascent and covert counterculture—not the part of the culture that catered to us, but the part that ached, hungry for the dismantling of the complacencies that made daily life bearable but false.              

                                                                                                                                                       Pamela Lu 


the tears are looking for a place to alight in, they
aren't rain they're desolation

the tears are searching for you and will find you

                                                                   Alice Notley


The Book of Moments
 

Simply to scaffold being

in multiple frames of probability

then swag it in heavy drapes—

was that the timely choral work?

Or rather that the question of time

sat on the surface of language

and laughed when I tried to face it

and laughed when I tried to face it

                                   Lisa Robertson


If all the stories are placed on top of each other, everything ultimately becomes invisible. Then you have to choose.

Per Olov Enquist


I heard being-without-identity touch the landscape, make it speak, come alive. I heard the absence of assertion, the unreality, the potential for expansion, the not-self, the readiness to respond.         

                                                                                                                                   Peter Waterhouse


I am to imitate a mirror like that of water (but water is not a mirror and it is dangerous to think so). 

                                                                                                                                                                 Anne Carson

Amulet Sonnets
 

Love is dead in us

                        if we forget

                        the virtues of an amulet

                        and quick surprise

                               Robert Creeley