SIREN (some poetics)

Copublished with Amant Foundation
Edited by Quinn Latimer
Design by Gaile Pranckunaite
Photography by Adrianna Glaviano
246 pages, 160 images, softcover, 7 5/8 x 10 inches
978-1-954947-05-4

$32.00

Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional contributors, SIREN (some poetics) considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Amant, in Brooklyn, SIREN (some poetics) figures language in manifold forms: poem and essay, score and script, list and litany. All, though, emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.
With texts by Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, Ruth Estevez, Quinn Latimer and excerpts by Don Mee Choi, Anais Duplan, Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, a.o., and with artist contributions by Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, and Dena Yago

Press

Produces a profoundly sensual experience in which reading, looking, listening, and moving become one…No artificial cohesion has been enforced, no top-down epic narrative exerted, but harmonies and resonances have been found, creating polyphony.
Elvia Wilk, 4Columns
Instead of situating the siren call as a sound that is only perceptible by and exclusive to humans, Latimer posits a mode of listening that is metaphorical, contingent—and at the same time, often pleasurable.
—Wendy Vogel, Art Agenda
In a sense, the imagined grotesquerie of the Homeric Sirens was yet another way for patriarchs to repress the ambivalence of other voices. These artists claim the possibility that an incantation could be so powerful.
—Travis Diehl, The New York Times
Assembles media-spanning work from the 1970s to the present to explore poetry in the expanded field, a form of language-making that – like the Sirens’ song – traffics in the unknowable and unutterable.
—Cassie Packard, Frieze