notational
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
68 pages
Cover painting by Joanne G. Yoshida
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-2-3
$12.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/notational/15740264
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s notational furthers an Identity Positioning System that resembles in elegance and efficacy the memory theaters of the ancients. Each page finds the margin where transition is meaning and each sensational flutter awaits its name. Intensity is all: “Power lines on the range.” She never lets the words down, nor fails to put them accurately where most needed. — Bill Berkson
In her sixth book of poems, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa breaks fresh ground, finding new ways to see and restructure her world. In fragments of observations teetering precariously and falling into the unexpected, Jane sees into the backside of social and cultural relations, while at the same time undermining them. This is the “border between identity and non-identity”. Here, we wake up “in an unfamiliar language”, and find that it is our own. — Eric Selland
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s notational puts consciousness through an egg slicer and allows the slices to slip away and initiate poetic investigations within the environments that have come to define the fractured backdrop of the everyday: empty buses, the repletions of consumer overload, bamboo groves, eyes that gaze at each other (untranslatable), the horrible vivisection of animals, selves that melt and bend through a social stage in which the locus of identity is always the center of multiple controls. This poetry is timely, intelligent and beautiful — and though the investigations involved often move through deeply unsettling territory, the ingenuity of the poetry itself displays the imaginative promesse de bonheur that keeps the loophole opened: “grim tasks of survival do not bring happiness / yet the wind”. — Trane DeVore
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