Poetry. Melissa Buzzeo's WHAT BEGAN US is a story of portraiture, a philosophy of the book, and the retrieval of a fifteen-year-old girl from the ruins of an unnamed (unnameable) event. This unsettling work builds out of the debris of fractionated memory and broken gestures toward an illuminated structure, a thought project well worth the time it will take to know it. "WHAT BEGAN US is an agitated, activated lyric that incants to a changing, pulsating beloved. What or who this beloved is goes beautifully unnamed. This is a new take on that very old form of the lyric. In its newness it is something shimmering and fully complicated."-Juliana Spahr

What Began Us

Literature & Fiction

Buzzeo, Melissa

Poetry

Leon Works

<p>Poetry. "FACE is an archae book written both 'after and before.' Recessive narrative events--faces surfacing, twinned with wet surfaces, gone--are released as agents, as saturations of tone and line. 'Inside and out of passage,' Melissa Buzzeo forms a document that is both report and threshold: text and radical architecture: a 'beginning' always 'in transit.' What I love about this work is its refusal to feel, if feeling has become impossible, and, in corollary, its willingness to flood its own terrain, to melt a 'frozen book.' In this way, FACE becomes the 'shape which is desire to see.' It brings towards us the 'hesitant' girl who finds a way to breathe and write again, next to the water which is both lake and paper, the pages floating offshore 'in a dream.' Retrieving these pages, Melissa Buzzeo writes to us: a complex, present, also-writing 'you'"--Bhanu Kapil.</p>

Face

Book*Hug

<p>The Devastation, a performance novel or poem, is based on the fallibility of a single image: a sea-wreck in language, the lovers on the floor of the sea, a sea of poetry, current, currency, connection--the world. How do we value "impoverished speech" or try to find abundance in impoverishment? A narrative that stems from "an image that is never exhausted" whose affect pervades the function of the whole, The Devastation is a lyric exploration of relation and community.</p>

Devastation

Nightboat Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Buzzeo, Melissa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Buzzeo, Melissa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Buzzeo, Melissa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

What Began Us

Face

Devastation