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Reviews
“In
five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of
elastic migrations
that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose
innate
peril is miraculously saved in the act of naming: “each name
for a thing seems
intent to curl from its shelled meaning.” Places, histories,
persons, myth and
object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous
apprehension
and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs
has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces,
in Stevens’ phrase, “a new knowledge of reality.”
--Ann Lauterbach
Waterwork works—in both senses of the word: all its intricate
parts are moving
smoothly in sync, and it succeeds. Such productive ambiguity rules
the
whole collection, which takes water and language as primary, parallel
media,
in the sense of growth media, in which all sorts of fascinating
things can be
cultured. In Riggs’ case, they’re all unprecedented
hybrids of science and
sound. She turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well
as natural history
and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The
result is
a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday
world
more detailed and thus more grand.
--Cole Swensen
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Sarah Riggs
is a poet, translator, and visual artist, born in New York in
1971.
She has lived in Paris since 2001, where she’s an integral
member of the bilingual
poetry collective, Double Change, and the director of Tamaas,
a non-profit arts organization. In 2006, she began teaching for
Columbia University in Paris.
Waterwork is her first volume of poetry in English. Chain
of Miniscule Decisions
in the Form of a Feeling is forthcoming with Reality Street
Editions. 28 télégrammes
and 60 textos have been translated by Françoise
Valéry and published by Editions
de l’Attente. A book of essays, Word Sightings: Poetry
and Visual Media in Stevens,
Bishop, and O’Hara, appeared with Routledge in 2002.
From the French, Sarah Riggs has translated poetry by Etel Adnan,
Marie Borel,
Oscarine Bosquet, Isabelle Garron, Jérôme Mauche,
and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Her
installation Underwritten—Chambre d’illisibilité
(Galerie eof , Paris, 2007) explores
language plurality.
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