Imogen Stidworthy (English, French and Swedish Edition)

Bergvall, Caroline

Matt's Gallery

This book gathers a decade of Caroline Bergvall’s innovative pieces, from her long out-of-print performance text Goan Atom, inspired by the graphic contortions of Hans Bellmer’s Doll and violent love fantasies of other radical body-inspired artists, The Shorter Chaucer, a series of contemporary tales exploring social mores in a feisty mix of languages, and the hybrid and visual prose pieces Cropper, Cat in the Throat, and Middling English. This volume―rich, multi-layered, acerbic, humorous―creates a strong case for how new literature can provide speculative and performative excursions into post-urban lives and idoms and explore renewed visions for languages.

Meddle English: New and Selected Texts

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Nightboat Books

Alisoun Sings finds its starting-point with Chaucer’s iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Her forceful voice leads the way across narratives of genders, and addresses the brutality of social conventions with caustic humor. This labyrinthine text navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English, beyond its dominance as a global lingua franca, and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages.

Alisoun Sings

"Fig" is the second installment of "Goan Atom" and continues its exploration of poetic practice registered through physical uptake. Delighting in the corporeal use of language, these pieces explore the surface tensions of our encounters with the processes of recognition. Each piece has previously been initiated as part of a performance work or collaborative installation and short prefatory notes reflect on these different writing practices.

Fig: Goan Atom 2

Salt Pub

Caroline Bergvall’s Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today’s sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, “Drift,” which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall’s explorations of historical English language.

Drift

British & Irish