An innovative work of fiction, Jeff Alessandrelliâs And Yet interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through historical references, cultural commentary, and the authorâs own restless imagination. And Yet builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras, and Kobo Abe, while alluding to the work of Susan Sontag, Young Thug, Young Jean Lee, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath, and Louise GlĂŒck, among others. With its nameless protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his daunting interiority, And Yetâs form morphs, cracks, and continuously tries to repair itself while becoming a nuanced story of our times. âLove is a thing full of anxious fear. Especially when what you ultimately love and fear is your self,â writes Alessandrelli, and And Yet draws such a notion down, out and around again, arriving at its own idiosyncratic answers by the end of the book.
And Yet asks, What might be gained or lost from living oneâs life via text instead of directly participating in the world? Through aphorism, anecdote, observation, and narrative, Alessandrelli examines the complex entanglements of sexuality and desire. A profound and concise work of self-construction.
âPatrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Composed in delicately and suggestively connected fragments, Jeff Alessandrelliâs And Yet is a lyrical yet probing investigation of the nature of modern intimacy, full of heart but always meticulously thoughtful.
âJoe Moran, author of Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness
Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of four books, most recently the poetry collection, Fur Not Light. His poetry and prose have been published in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews in The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, Rain Taxi, and more. He directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions.
ISBN: 978-1-892061-97-3
268 pages, paperback
Cover design and book layout by Mike Corrao
Interview with Jeff on The Lives of Writers
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I tend to write about things I know nothing about, and there is of course a vast amount published on any given topic. Eventually I have to abandon further research, accept my ignorance, and start writing. After all, Iâm trying to create a literary text, not produce an academic article.
--Eliot Weinberger
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4/11/24
"As a failure and a stranger I'm equally depressed
with spring resembling fall I'm also confused"
--Liu Zongyuan, 816
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3/31/24
November 25
Brian Blanchfield
A snow-dirty car, engine on, idles
in front of the house across the street
and the Great Dane, released, squats in the lot,
then runs back onto the porch, head at the door.
The man inside requires careâparamedics
have come twice this week, and the ambulance
is familiar to this window too. The exhaust
curls back over the rear windshield like a lip
in filmic villainy. The bare mountain beyond
is brown and the peaks behind it are white.
One catches the first of the sun from somewhere.
Bernadette Mayer came to Tucson once
and I helped host and when she went back home
she sent me Ethics of Sleep, the tallest
paperback I have of poetry. I have to keep it
with the art. I read her randy poem that nearly
queers Carlton Fisk, his squat and his mitt
she calls her idealâoh the legs of a catcherâ
on the radio. Just this week, before I knew,
before perhaps she died, I shared Memory
with my class, and Midwinter Day. I like
when she remarks, I see what she means,
about the woman in line at the post office
who asks if sheâd like feedback on her
dinner party. A book not of Strega and taxis
and Mal Waldron, Lana Turner, but of
beer and pills and diapers and dreams and Lewis.
Her mustache was, I want to say, important,
her fisherâs vest. She favored one side
as most of us will or do. Requiring care
harder than giving it in the beginning. A turn
at poetry she gave others of her own. Helen,
Helen, Helen, Helen, and Helen of Troy.
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She was a critic of the Western canon, but not for the usual reasons. Her concern was not that it left out people of color or of non-European heritage, but that it was an obstacle to the avant-garde; indeed, she could be withering in her criticism of works by non-Western authors that nevertheless replicated the tropes of canonical writing.
Professor Perloff was an advocate of close reading, or the word-by-word, line-by-line examination of a text, and of seeking beauty in literature, long after both concepts had become suspect in some academic circles for playing down the social and political contexts of a work.
âShe definitely turned against the reigning mode of whom to read and how to write about them to expand the canon and look at more challenging experimental work,â Andrew Epstein, a professor of English at Florida State University, said in a phone interview.
Professor Perloff gained notice with her 1977 book âFrank OâHara: Poet Among Painters,â the first full-length assessment of a writer who until then had been largely ignored by scholars but who, in part thanks to her, has since come to be regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the past century.
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I should be at standing rock instead of listening to laura nyro under a river tree and drinking
coconut water in the columbia river gorge
on a beach that would not exist unless the earth was exploded to construct a series of man-made
dams along this rivers natural course
that would not exist unless sacred indigenous lands and cultural artifacts were drowned or
displaced entire populations relocated removed by force by gunpoint by threat of death
now this site is a nude beach primarily populated by cismale white queers
a couple months ago someone complained on facebook about the amount of heterosexuals who
were taking over the beach / the prime real estate / fallacious queer utopic destination: âDo you
remember when Rooster Rock was a gay beach?â
I chimed in âRemember when Rooster Rock was Indigenous Land?â
someone said âThis comment should have ended the discussion.â
but you know how white progressives are
they keep going
and going
and going
but before I allow the frustration to consume me
I have to remind myself that everyone has a right to their opinion
and we live in a time of corruptive culture
desperate for attention
desperate to leave our mark somewhere
desperate to give away any soul we have left
for a momentary glimpse of validation
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Until Guy died of lung cancer at a Lexington hospital in January 2005.
His partner and lover, Bonnie Jean Cox, survived him by twelve years.
Bonnie was the Director of the Collection Development Department
At the University of Kentucky, where Guy was a professor of English.
I loved Bonnie. She was nerdy and warm, but with Yankee sarcasm.
She developed Alzheimerâs, right after Guy died, and forgot everyone.
Their vibe was: he would say outrageous things and she would chide.
People joked that âBonnie Jean seems like a lesbian and so does Guyâ
And it was kind of like that, they sort of seemed like a lesbian couple,
Although, you know? Not really. Guy had his own kind of masculinity.
The strangest part of his biography was that he had been in the army.
He understood well, like his hero Fourier, that our sexualityâs a chord
Made up of notes. We play a few in our lives and leave others muted.
After Guy died somebody tactlessly asked Bonnie Jean if he was gay.
She said something quite colourful about how good the sex had been.
I remember sitting with them in front of Guyâs ground-floor fireplace.
He would burn trash in there, paper bags and empty cigarette packs.
Now and then they would scrounge around for more stuff to throw in,
Especially after theyâd exhausted the stack of rejected review copies,
Talking that famous Guy Davenport talk, which will never exist again,
Literary-historical free-association punctuated with dramatic pauses,
Ready to laugh but rarely silly, sometimes gossipy, sometimes bitchy.
He might tell you about a conversation that he had with his neighbours
Or about one that he had with Samuel Beckett at an old café in Paris.
He told me an anecdote about a visit heâd had from Cormac McCarthy,
Who for a time considered Guyâs Geography one of his favourite books.
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3/22/24
There was a letter that Ted Hughes wrote to his son, Nicholas. He said the only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest and how much they can ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.
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Breton argued instead for embracing the âomnipotence of dreamsâ and exploring the unconscious and all that was âmarvelousâ in life. Art that could reach beyond the rational could liberate humanity, he felt. âThe mere word âfreedomâ is the only one that still excites me,â Breton wrote in his âSurrealist Manifesto.â
It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production. Itâs now commonplace to call pretty much any weird experience âsurreal.â
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While discussion of My Life has been central to Hejinianâs reception history, her poetry and poetics transformed substantially afterwards. In the 1980s Hejinian taught herself Russian as a way to establish a direct dialogue with poets in the Soviet Union. This led to her translations of Arkadii Dragomoschenko and to her books Leningrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten) and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991). Other books from this period include The Cell (1992) and The Cold of Poetry (1994). In the first decade of the twenty-first century Hejinian published a series of shorter works â The Beginner (Tuumba, 2002), Slowly (Tuumba, 2002), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003) â as well as the longer book, A Border Comedy (2001), which Hejinian considered her most important work. Hejinianâs more recent poetry books include The Unfollowing (Omnidawn, 2016), Positions of the Sun (Belladona, 2018), and Tribunal (Omnidawn, 2019).
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Jayson Musson
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How many hours do you sleep?
Six at the max. Three if Iâm in the throes of a body of work.
What are you obsessed with?
Up until a couple years ago, I didnât miss many Blazers games. I would sacrifice studio time. Even if I had a project to do, I would go to a bar with friends to watch a game.
Describe being an artist in America.
Foolish. Itâs that age-old thing:Â why would you choose this? But itâs also empowering, to have this outlet to take in all the negative, the positiveâall the thingsâand throw them back at people in a creative way.
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LâEnigme dâIsidore Ducasse, 1920, remade 1972, consists of a sewing machine, wrapped in a blanket and tied with string. Man Rayâs idea of using a sewing machine was inspired by a simile used by the French writer, Isidore Ducasse (1809-87), better known as the Comte de LautrĂ©amont, âBeautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrellaâ. It was a phrase that was greatly admired by the writers in Paris with whom Man Ray was close friends and who formed the nucleus of the Paris dada and later surrealist groups. They saw it as paradigmatic of a new type of surprising imagery, as well as replete with disguised sexual symbolism. (The umbrella was interpreted as a male element, the sewing machine as a female element, and the dissecting table as a bed.). Man Rayâs wrapped object, however, was a mystery, and suggested not so much a sewing machine as some utterly undefined, and therefore potentially more disturbing, presence. The word âenigmaâ in the title echoed some of the titles of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), also much admired by the proto-surrealist group, while its image of something wrapped and hidden can be seen as a forerunner of images of disguised or concealed objects by the Belgian surrealist RenĂ© Magritte (1898-1967), as well as the later wrapped works of Christo (born 1935).
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Books appeared to be at the center of Mr. Navalnyâs prison life, all the way until his death.
In a letter last April to Mr. Krasilshchik, Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and âswitch between them.â He said he came to love memoirs: âFor some reason I always despised them. But theyâre actually amazing.â
He was frequently soliciting reading recommendations, but also dispensed them. Describing prison life to Mr. Krasilshchik in a July letter, he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.
Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread âOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,â the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalinâs gulag. Having survived a hunger strike and gone months âin the state of âI want to eat,ââ Mr. Navalny said he only now started to grasp the depravity of the Soviet-era labor camps.
âYou start to realize the degree of horror,â he wrote.
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