First Announcement: Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis

...soon available from Manypenny Press.

(Manypenny Press is a press I'm starting up with funds from my father's estate--Manypenny was me mother's maiden name.)

Start spreading the word! Text Loses Time brings together 180 pages of Vassilakis' visual and verbal work. Widely-published over the last twenty years, this is Vassilakis' first full-length book. We've just got a few finishing touches to do; look for other announcements as to price, where to order, etc. This is not a book to miss.

Some blurbage:

Part nested Minimalist cubes and part laser light that won't diverge across distance, Nico Vassilakis' poetry seems to ask whether we are primates at play on a baseball diamond of memory and desire beside mural-lined public structures slipping toward infinite regression.

Richly iterative, these pairings and alphabets escape the mirror to thrill us with variation and sting all forms of complacency. Vassilakis extends Oulipian strategies:  Perec references, lamellisections, crystalline build-outs and transpositions, a scat of nonrepresentational vocables, lettered whirlwinds giving speed for legibility, --  "extracting the gem through layers of gauze" and, other times, lowering a gem into a fold.

Can an argument between a machine that produces texts and "longhand into tiny notebooks" wake us up?  In pain, "the throbbing thumb" makes us "attend to the living."

If Vassilakis revises the rock lyric "meet-the-new-boss, same-as-the-old-boss" to "meet the solipsistic era.  same as the old solipsistic era,"  is treatment to be had in a bar, a science lab, or will it reach us over the radio?  Try a road trip, so "you can't afford to blink, to be blind for even a second" going through a colander out where dust is breeding and "glass traps lighting" like no scene you've seen in quite this way. Through crevices, perforations, punctures, piercings, pinholes, see neighborhoods as "that place where organized sleeping happens." So, look for a faceted colony that "sometimes congeals."

-- Deborah Meadows

Nico Vassilakis' Text Loses Time unhinges the folds of the book and the word; as the 'folded loose leafed sheets whiz past your ears' you can hear the echoes of meaning. The words flake off the page like aged paint leaving a patina of colour and meaning on the surface and a growing heap of signification at our feet. Here the means of writing rise up and turn against our expectation, lurching into new spaces. Letters become tactile, meaning becomes rubbery, and both reading and writing become a new collaboration.

-- derek beaulieu

Comments

[Nicholas Manning]

Wonderful news.

[Tom Beckett]

Congrats to all!