Poetry. "While the fables which are enfleshed in us surpass in hysteria even the least remittent syndromes of infotainment, we are inured to overexcitement just as we beg the favor and discipline of the decider, though he zeroes us, abetting the containment of our contaminants a long way from the house. It is within this perverse epoch that SORITES protrudes itself, ensconcing the prismatic caress between those 'noble lies' and the 'splendid men' who engender them as a golden shower of grammatical derivatives. We groom ourselves in a landscape barren of any 'reified' language in need of resuscitation, but rather lamped in the utter ambiguity of violence inherent in reception and address, 'The word as such strikes / ... As a bridge for the new man.' But emergence belies the heap. When the efficacy of speech appears to reside in its substancelessness, what is it to awake to find 'your bodily eikon dematerialized?' As Gertrude Stein, in 'Poetry and Grammar,' evokes her willed desecration of substantives and nouns when she suggests that the 'intense existence' of objects is contingent upon its being felt without its being named, SORITES bends Stein's inquiry toward our own democratic substantiations where the suckling of 'free speech' and the matasuegras of disinterested judgment develop out of pace, 'What is that / is not yet / depends on whose / thought can think / thought as / such.' We are asked, '"Is the public not the greatest / Sophist," especially when its word fails?' This pubescent indebtedness to future-users here cannot resolve itself in lunch-hour testimony, louching through great halls that the boards endeavored to erect without a body and without license. We may intuit that what is 'true / for all is / what makes what / ought to be for all / a fact' but this sapience leaves us no nearer the advertised mood. As man, among men, who has no use but uses, there is no adultery that cannot be disposed of before poetry. Our conjectural prosody will be upskirt."—Brad Flis

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Literature & Fiction

Giffin, Lawrence

Poetry

Tea Party Republicans Press

Poetry. CHRISTIAN NAME culls poems begun in 2005, when the poet Eric Baus introduced Giffin to linguistic studies on the "feral-child" Susan Wiley, better known by her medical pseudonym "Genie." Wiley was kept in isolation by her family until the age of thirteen, when she was discovered by a welfare worker in Temple City, CA. She quickly came to be seen as a new subject in a long line of "forbidden experiments," with other experiments in language deprivation going back to the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I. Young psycholinguists hurried to test Wiley to see whether she would prove or disprove the critical period hypothesis, a hypothesis in linguistics that language acquisition is possible only within the first few years of brain development, a theory that Wiley seemed poised to prove, but not before her mother reasserted her parental rights and the experiment ended.There is nothing more terrifying than the thought of being unable to name or even to recognize one's terror. And yet, as Jacques Lacan wrote in a 1948 lecture, "A child who does not yet speak reacts differently to punishment than to brutality." Instead of attempting to give voice to the mute child, the poems in Christian Name seek to expand her silence to all aspects of private and public life. Through tortuous grammatical constructions, one-liners, perverted non-sequiturs, and appropriated language, CHRISTIAN NAME affirms not so much that language is at bottom mute material but that it's provisional, that speaking and writing are integral to the ongoing production of social contracts."Lawrence Giffin's CHRISTIAN NAME isn't very funny. Not unlike a Lars Von Trier film, CHRISTIAN NAME shines its backwoods' flashlight on big questions: knowledge, religion, institutionalization, child-rearing, the recklessness of being...and none of it is very funny. CHRISTIAN NAME's central character is Genie—the pseudonym for a feral child who spent nearly all of her first thirteen years of life locked inside a bedroom strapped to a potty chair. But unlike the teams of specialists and do-gooders who want to right Genie, CHRISTIAN NAME furthers her darkness by fusing these private and public spheres, and it isn't very funny. Even the 'The Unfinished/System of Nonknowledge, Revised / Edition, trans. by YouTube.com / into a crappy lo-res version / of DOS capital T truth and desk / copy "Justice" for run program' isn't very funny here. Neither is: 'My other god's an atheist, a.k.a. Cloaca Maxima, / whose back is turned to us. We believe in it / as long as it remains in the dark, and that / is our great excuse for not knowing any better.' CHRISTIAN NAME is a brilliant and darkly pensive accident, as we all are...and it isn't very funny."—Robert Fitterman

Christian Name

Ugly Duckling Presse

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Books by Giffin, Lawrence

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

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Christian Name