Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Gordon

Wilkinson

Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson are the authors of Figures for a Darkroom Voice.

Gordon is also the author of Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007; selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series), A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Inbox (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, 2004), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003).

Wilkinson is also the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is due out next year.

Figures for a Darkroom Voice
Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson
with images by Noah Saterstrom

ISBN: 9780977901951
Poetry | 5.5″x7″, 88 pp, pbk. | Oct. 2007

OUT OF PRINT

In the prose poems, syntactically elusive sonnets, and haunting, haiku-like fragments of Figures for a Darkroom Voice, illuminated by the ink drawings of Noah Saterstrom, one encounters a recurring cast of logically-skewed images, inauspicious yet arresting aphorisms, and characters rendered fully bizarre in the lightest of brushstrokes. The rhetorical twisting of Noah Eli Gordon’s abstractions meld with the ominous narratives of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s fragments, turning Wallace Steven’s notion of a supreme fiction toward a supreme friction, one where the work of these two poets is fused into a voice as singular as it is sinister. Imagine a gallery in which Cornell boxes talk back, a Maya Deren film in which the audience dissolves into projector light, a Philip Glass composition played exclusively on medieval weaponry, such are the compelling results of this collaborative work. Here, the slippage and disruptions of textually investigative work collides with the mind-expanding project of conjuring paradox, while never quite leaving linearity behind.

praise for Figures for a Darkroom Voice

These two guys tell us,
“There is nothing that summer can do to us
That we could not ourselves develop in the basement”
so we know
“the sleepwalkers enter a swimming pool
With their haggings& black dresses,”
“raising private horses”
Therefore it’s true
“What mammal wouldn’t want its own vibrant egg?”
They glitter. This book glitters.

—Tomaž Šalamun

Figures for a Darkroom Voice enacts the transformations that occur in the objects that exist in our world. For Gordon and Wilkinson, this change normally follows an eroding path—a stripping away either to the essential or to the garbage. In this way, their voice comes across not as a warning, but as an ominous knell.”

—Interim

These aren’t just two guys with three names each; these are two of the poets to watch in the next generation. Gordon just won the National Poetry Series Open (judged by the legendary John Ashbery) for his book Novel Pictorial Noise, and Wilkinson won the coveted Iowa Poetry Prize for his book Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk. Here the two have combined voices for a frisky, lithe, verbal romp. What started as an experiment in poetics, passing a pad of paper back and forth across a cafe table, ended as one of the most interesting books of last year. Think language poetry meets Project Runway. With whimsical drawings by Noah Saterstrom, and published by the always stellar Tarpaulin Sky Press

—Powell’s (Staff Pick)

In a hyper-surreal collaboration, Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson take the prose poem to new, wild heights…. The two poets show how simply seeing is the door to complex experience.

—Ray González, Bloomsbury Review