Sewing Her Hand to the Face of the Fleeting
by Liz Brennan

ISBN: 0-9656161-3-4
Saddle-stitched, $4.00
Publication Date: 1998.
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 28 pages
PROSE POETRY

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Bookstores: Order through Asterism Books.

Using her observations on growing up, falling into love, visiting friends — even on the “discovery” of the New World and an invasion of bears, Liz Brennan does some amazing things with language in her collection of 22 prose poems. No one pushes syntax to its limit better.

“Sewing Her Hand to the Face of the Fleeting is full of unexpected discoveries in the land of the imagination, syntax and human relations! A pleasure to read.”
—Lydia Davis

“Columbus and a lily buried deep in the misted horizon of a bay strewn with delicate bird song and immensity of sky destined to merge everything within its gathering darkness — is seen to be not the same as the book. Separate experiences unfold.”
—Leslie Scalapino

“After years of appearances in intriguingly secret places, Liz Brennan’s astonishing sudden fictions are at last available as a small book. These are emotionally compelling, deeply challenging texts, written with a Kafkan density, and a snaky kind of comic rhythm that squeezes hard. I find myself remembering them long afterwards, and the memory tastes good.”
—Robert Kelly

From Sewing Her Hand to the Face of the Fleeting...

Talk About Rock

Anyone who wishes to talk about rock must begin quickly or risk having the current speaker resume which may lead to simultaneous rock talk, which is generally avoided, or to lapses in the flow of talk about rock, which is generally discomforting.

Talk about rock cannot prove many things.

The import of a given piece of talk about rock is always held in relation to what has preceded it and what may follow.

Talk about rock covaries in form and function, because in any piece of rock, as in any piece of talk, many things may be going on at once.

Overlaps do occur if two or more potential next speakers start their talk about rock at the same time, and often the current speaker is interrupted before she or he is ready to be. Fortunately, both may back off and try again.

Given this and other repair techniques, what little simultaneous talk about rock found to occur is usually classified as being very brief.

Exceptions may occur only in the case of an interrupted speaker who may choose to continue to talk his or her talk about rock at the same time as the interrupter at a higher volume or pitch to heighten the color — or in certain types of talk about rock which require simultaneous speech, such as chants, cheers, prayers and other situations where the rock is seen as an expression of solidarity rather than as object on which to base an exchange of differing attitudes or ideas — or in the case of collective monologue where, for instance, a group is seated around a table together, each pursuing a line of talk about rock but paying little mind to each other’s talk in an “everybody talks about rock but no one listens” cacophony.