Memory assists perception, grounding our understanding of those around us and those who have left their traces through time â€“ but how reliable is memory really? Memory is malleable, shaped and shifted through consolidation and reconsolidation. Consolidation is the neurological process that stores memories after an event's occurrence; reconsolidation refers to a process whereby consolidated memories later become unstable, causing false or loose recall. Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you is a lyrical montage born out of the eternal loss of a loved one. Powerfully crafted during griefâ€™s inertia, Janice Lee elegantly weaves the present with recollections of a tenuous past, arresting memory's flexible and vulnerable position in the lifelong process of mourning. A eulogy for a loved one â€“ pure and honest â€“ Reconsolidation is a poetic search for a lost connection.

Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you (Success and Failure Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lee, Janice

Community & Culture

Penny-Ante Editions

FULL COLOR EDITION, with Holga photographs by Rochelle Ritchie Spencer  “Janice Lee is a genius.” – Eileen Myles, author of Inferno (a poet’s novel)  “Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language – in minimal bursts of physical intensities, their magnitude measured in intimate discretes. Janice Lee's prose is energy transfer of the elementary particles of the matter of language. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language, understood at the infinitesimal level. No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body.”   – Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel  “Daughter, the new volume by Janice Lee, seems to rise as intuitive quantum ascent. It is praxis of the marred, of the seemingly uneven. Janice Lee understands that writing cannot exist as narrative outcome. In Daughter there is reckoning with the cosmos as phantom, as something that does and does not exist. Energies appear by means of paradox and evaporation.”   – poet Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome  "In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells. From field to field among the pages we are subject to a brain-damaged, collide-o-scopic file of some internet-age Acker'd Frankenstein having lived to see god die; and yet still must go on walking in the deity's corpse, inside of which the billion bodies in such image have built our huts of shit and shit inside them. 'The sea is a mysterious force, but there is no sea in the desert,' she writes, prodding at the hole left in the fabric on the earth between the homes: another phantom in a field of phantoms who themselves have again died. The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child." – Blake Butler, author of There is No Year  "'The word 'monster' derives from Latin monstrum, an aberrant occurrence, usually biological, that was taken as a sign that something was wrong within the natural order.' (Wikipedia) As Janice Lee proves, the same is true for daughters. Lee's surgical cadences and sharp fragments work here as writing will work-to force attention to detail. Which is the unnatural order of things." – Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa and Dies: A Sentence

Daughter: a novel

Literature & Fiction

Jaded Ibis Press

Forgiveness of a Broken Heart

Romance

Publishamerica Inc

Review\nIf I could swim inside the language of Janice Lee's Imagine a Death I'd never come out. Just like the ocean, which is just like language and the subconscious, the passages open up from death outward into life and desire, eros and thanatos creating wave after wave of unending being and unbeing, strange undulations of beauty. When pain and loss travel they inhabit us over many different times and places, locate on a single body and then release like energy into a thousand starshot particles. To enter the realm of Imagine a Death is to enter both particle and wave, species and botany, a heart beating toward its own end which is of course all beginnings. 
- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge 
Like a funereal mask studded with gemstones on its inside, Imagine a Death embodies a vast, preternatural and intensely intimate terrain, slipping headfirst into the impossible expanses between suffering and mourning, seeking and failing, spiral and flame. For Janice Lee is not the sort to turn her back where others duck and cover; sentence by sentence, her rhapsodic fearlessness and tender logic not only reflects and withstands, it listens back; it redefines as it rewires what's gone missing; it refuses to give in to its regrets. The result is the greatest work to-date of one of America's most elemental voices and death-defiers, a kind of lamp that breaks the dark. 
- Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott 
In the early hours of Janice Lee's Imagine a Death, a story is told about a crack in a wall out of which emanates an eerie light, then strange whirling sounds like eternity being shredded apart. What happens next is terrifying and profound, and seems to be not only an analogue for Lee's book, but a description of how she receives the horror vacui of the world and transforms it into a form of reparative spell-binding. Imagine a Death confirms Lee as the descendant of Béla Tarr, of moss that breathes, then hibernates, then breathes, of spiders in the corners of houses, of ancestral museums that only open past midnight, and of the earliest forms of shamanic storytelling. 
- Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall 
A delicate constellation of lives both human and not that keep threatening to come together to form meaning but then, with each new section, changes shape, continuing to open up. Imagine a Death is an illuminating exploration of radical intersubjectivity, the understanding that even though everyone and everything potentially can touch everything else, nothing accumulates with narrative neatness. Through brilliantly complex sentences, Lee offers a disjunctive synthesis on the multifold possibilities and fears of being. 
- Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World 
Imagine a Death is a roving vision quest and a blueprint for a liberational politics of being in the world. Manifold transformation occurs as shifts in consciousness disrupt patterns of traumatic encounter. Unfolding intimacies among diverse relations cause the world to flex exponentially dissolving barriers of interdependence. Intricately sensitive and lucidly aware of the urgency of attending to and engendering the flourishing of livable worlds in uncertain times, Janice Lee demonstrates how a togetherness in sentience is extended, intensified and strengthened. Imagine a Death is ecstatic, gorgeous and wise; a revelatory book holding the persistent glow of terrestrial reality that involves all floral, faunal and mineral presence. 
- Brenda Iijima, author of Bionic Communality\nIn the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she w

Imagine a Death: a novel (Innovative Prose)

United States

Texas Review Press

Kerotakis is Janice Lee's postmodern exploration of consciousness, form and narrative, as it follows the journey of G.I.L.L. A contemporary reimagining of Frankenstein that takes us forwards, backwards and sideways through time and space, this is a cutting-edge novel for the multimedia age. You can find more of her work in Women Writing the Weird.

Kerotakis

Contemporary

Dog Horn Publishing

[BLACK AND WHITE EDITION] “Janice Lee is a genius.” – Eileen Myles, author of Inferno (a poet’s novel) ART: Original Holga photographs by Rochelle Ritchie Spencer SOUND: original music by Resident Anti-Hero “Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language -- in minimal bursts of physical intensities, their magnitude measured in intimate discretes. Janice Lee's prose is energy transfer of the elementary particles of the matter of language. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language, understood at the infinitesimal level. No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body.” – Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel “Daughter, the new volume by Janice Lee, seems to rise as intuitive quantum ascent. It is praxis of the marred, of the seemingly uneven. Janice Lee understands that writing cannot exist as narrative outcome. In Daughter there is reckoning with the cosmos as phantom, as something that does and does not exist. Energies appear by means of paradox and evaporation.” – poet Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome "In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells. From field to field among the pages we are subject to a brain-damaged, collide-o-scopic file of some internet-age Acker'd Frankenstein having lived to see god die; and yet still must go on walking in the deity's corpse... The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child. – Blake Butler, author of There is No Year "Lee's surgical cadences and sharp fragments work here as writing will work-to force attention to detail. Which is the unnatural order of things. – Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa and Dies: A Sentence

Literary

In every manner of framing, there is a house. There is a door one must enter through, a door one must shut behind herself in order to leave. In every manner of space, there is an intimate and crucial rivalry between open and close, between time and memory, between myself and yourself. The further we walk together, the further we walk in parallel, that distance between us that wavers, minuscule on some days, and incredibly vast on others, but always and certainly there, that distance persists. The entire sky between us. The entire sky between us.

The Sky Isn't Blue

Poetry

Civil Coping Mechanisms

A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in

Iijima, Brenda

Meekling Press

A complex and entangled text that explores inherited trauma, the presence of ghosts, interspecies communication, the dream world, grief, and human/animal separation. 
Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the difficult moments anticipating the deaths of her beloved dog companions, Separation Anxiety marks the first collection of poetry from acclaimed prose writer Janice Lee, and is a meditation on inhabitation and existence beyond the human.

Separation Anxiety

Self-Help

Death & Grief

CLASH Books

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Books by Lee, Janice