Friday, June 12, 2009

Now out from Otoliths—A SCRIPT, Joel Chace's new chapbook

"Joel Chace’s reading at Robins Books May 19 makes me want to look at his linebreaks again," wrote Ron Silliman in a footnote to a recent post to his blog. This new chapbook provides the perfect opportunity.



A SCRIPT
Joel Chace
24 pages
Cover photo by Michael Aanji Crowley
Otoliths 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-3-1
$8.25 + p&h
Direct URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/a-script/7226173
Joel Chace's A Script cons our part: part Asbergian stutter, part zen enlightenment, words and white spaces carefully/ randomly placed pace us through a spectrum of verbal light, asking if there is a difference between self and other, background and text. These experiments of space and the phrase and word range over nature, food, and communi-cation, invoking Inca and Silliman both, "speaking that other language again ... yield itself each sentence." —Larissa Shmailo

I like what Joel Chace does with the topology of the line, the way he shows how far it can be stretched while still maintaining its integrity. And I like how in doing so he takes the plainest words—especially everyday nouns like work, linen, world, office, desk, ceiling—and makes them oddly visible in the poem's raking light:
"words         /                 tiny           far
         but clear" indeed. —Barry Schwabsky

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