chax press

Posing the question—who speaks?—still retains its force, though plotting the folding of the line between biography and autobiography, could be no more than a ruse. Or, as is the case here, it can mark points of production, perhaps creation. Karen Mac Cormack writes a play of voices and the voicing of places as they combine. The combination is one where what would otherwise be merely singular begins to overlap. Citation, statement and creation—a multiplicity of moments that are only present as a weave—work together to narrate. The reader is implicated from the start. However, there is no single place that calls. Voices continue to speak. Identities however—the names and voices—can only ever be glanced at. And yet, the writing suggests. Humour and a complex sense of pathos work together. The writing entices. As would be expected Karen Mac Cormack has written an important book. Its presence connects the pleasure that reading affords with the critical reflection that writing demands.

Karen Mac Cormack Implexures (complete edition) Prose ISBN 978-0-925904-74-4 $16.95 136 pages
Posing the question—who speaks?—still retains its force, though plotting the folding of the line between biography and autobiography, could be no more than a ruse. Or, as is the case here, it can mark points of production, perhaps creation. Karen Mac Cormack writes a play of voices and the voicing of places as they combine. The combination is one where what would otherwise be merely singular begins to overlap. Citation, statement and creation—a multiplicity of moments that are only present as a weave—work together to narrate. The reader is implicated from the start. However, there is no single place that calls. Voices continue to speak. Identities however—the names and voices—can only ever be glanced at. And yet, the writing suggests. Humour and a complex sense of pathos work together. The writing entices. As would be expected Karen Mac Cormack has written an important book. Its presence connects the pleasure that reading affords with the critical reflection that writing demands. — Andrew Benjamin
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Implexures by Karen Mac Cormack co-published with West House Books, United Kingdom ISBN 0-925904-42-2, 80 pages, $16 UK ISBN 1-904052-11-8
from IMPLEXURES: Eight historical letters 8 I expect all those sort of things of hers went to a cousin or a great nephew or great great. I am not at all sure but think his name was John Christian & have no idea where he lives. — Margaret Mac Cormack (née Ward Thomas) The wind as confluence of surfaces tangled if unseen by any “poetress.” Henry served on the Wolverine suppressing the slave trade on the East Coast of Africa (1849–52). “In one’s arms” a location of intimacy, though “it is not possible to be lucid about the dances of society in the interval after the minuet and gavotte . . . and before the waltz and quadrille.” When that ties what this, a schism, the glimpse of shape of hand inherited line of neck an eye on both. All the Sunday afternoons of a lifetime. Walk away. I have, as I mentioned earlier, no intention of giving “the family” the details of my lifestyle and accordingly I should expect envy, to a certain degree. (However, it would appear that envy has no degrees, a fact I constantly forget. But the implications I read into her letter cut a little deeper than usual. . . . ) (Carrara, Italy, 27 February 78) In a locale (or at a “location”) where seagulls prove nocturnal (the white gulls of Porto) the Atlantic is a stretch into Baroque sky’s cathedral identification. The steepness rewinds streets to shore, bridges and liquids splay across breeze the laundry being so copious blocks. She notes that “Even the most scintillating pen can descend to depths of abysmal boredom when it describes travels.” Yet another’s “discretion with her pen is forever a smokescreen.” The pages remain sheets of discrete opacity words are aligned on but while meaning rotates each reader of meanings part attention gaps. “Everybody looked magnificent, nobody happy.” The planet’s spinning and our traversing (with) it a shorthand of applied relocation. Never far from near(by). Open-air sex the scent of night grass and line of bark breaking across other than spoke. How the leaves moved post-indentation’s “we.” Summer night it was the moss-scent fingers slid toward an appreciation of green in multiple shades. A small park off a residential street’s still there, though what were once one-hundred-year-old apple trees have been cleared for a motorway. To have gone away again means I’ve still not met him. Remind the shell of the land sea uncovers, hold the glass up to the eclipse’s fifteen minutes. The windows open out, in, up, or not at all, on a garden, the street, the sea, a lake, river or desert, cobbled courtyard, mountains, sometimes hills, with or without curtains, a highway, motorway, freeway, other windows’ occupants, deck. Cicada time in the present but Jezebel’s famous for learning censure by simply looking out. From a prior car a winter afternoon’s snow on the road and in fields passed by on time for coach home. The oncoming pick-up right in the middle it’s a good thing there weren’t seatbelts fastened as the swerve up the incline rolled us into the back seats upside down over the side of the then empty road. No injuries except to the car in dimpse (twilight). Three strikes and light’s out.
Reviews: Karen Mac Cormack builds an exquisitely delicate polybiographic structure out of research, hearsay and quotation that zings to the core of identity and displays how collaborative it really is. This book is one of those rare sensual delights that also really makes you think. — Cole Swensen (author of Try) Implexures is a text from which the pathos of fiction is totally absent, where the themes of memory, personal history and family history are transmuted by the rhythm of the syntactic line of language. Not so much a polyphony of fictional voices as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Implexures is the only text I know where the active construction of sense, as opposed to the meaning of doxa, is the true subject of the text. In other words, this is a poetic gem, but above all a necessary text — a text that shows what the poetic force of language can do to prose: push it towards its limits, towards the creative a-grammaticality of style, towards other media, like music and images. In short, this is a text that is the very embodiment of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of style. — Jean-Jacques Lecercle (author of Deleuze and Language)
Quirks & Quillets by Karen Mac Cormack ISBN 0-925904-04-X 1991, poetry 48 pages $8

Implexures

by Karen Mac Cormack