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A rehearsal in time
for the dead ones as landscape (handbook)
her book can't know how to
tell you then turns and does
a gloss on the Castle of O? blueprint for Vertigo?
pingpong of sources in vast cinematic bowl
bared body unspeakable
but never at a loss for words
the sheerest proposal there is
trying to come through these pages
--Clark Coolidge
In this Nude Memoir--a roving gallery of nude torsos, nude cadaver
toes, nude female lover and dead male lover, nude bride undoing God's
and Duchamp's imposed abstract nakedness--a woman is born. She is born
of words formed when "a sex (is) offered to a face." She is
terrible and she is wonderful. She is film noir married to Baroque. She
is sentences, magnificence, lust. She is an edifice of loss materializing
and dematerial-izing on a line between poetry and prose that Laura Moriarty
casts with the hand of a magician. I, too, dream of stripping bare this
figure that the poet has so gorgeously decked out, to get to the heart
of her namelessness. Nude Memoir is an entrancing work of love,
mourning, and resistance by a major poet.
--Gail Scott
"She is in trouble with time." Is the woman perfected? Can she
be saved? Trick questions in the "double present." There is
a body, and "An artist. A con artist," a criminal, a killer,
whose work positions, immobilizes, dismembers, kills, encrypts her. "The
nude is given"--in and into an enclosure where she figures the ground
that founds and fractures figuration and enclosure. The reflection-work
of the woman artist or poet further complicates this geometry: "In
the museum you look back at yourself." The nude gets up and goes
for a walk, sits down to write her life. Moriarty follows, directs, acts
the work of this body as staggered, stepwise motion building bodies of
work, including her own. "The actor is left," a potential for
enjambed coincidence that bodies forth coherence on a large scale, while
struggling at every join in that construction against the crypt that structure
threatens to become. Women, workers, slaves, aliens and monsters, husbands
who do not survive, children who are "not born men"--this might
include us all, but its very transparency warns against taking that hope
as given: "Someone sees through it." Someone dies. Someone survives
vertigo by "gaps in recognition," an argument with fate "shored
up" by the very irremissibility of time. Someone is both. A double
agent. Never quite at once.
Nude Memoir is the best crime story you will read this year. It
is also essentially a work of profound and unfinished mourning, of mourning
and of not finishing. "One way to remain unfinished is to stop. The
other is to go on."
--Taylor Brady
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