Poetry. Taking its name from the literal field of the chessboard, Kristi Maxwell's first book explores the dynamics of engagement, both through and within language. These poems are interested in the strategies that interactions encompass -- interactions between words, between illusion and non-illusion, between idea and image, between speakers, between voices, and between reader and text. From the history of the chess-playing automaton known as The Turk to a series of flirtations cadged in the game's battlefield language, the subjects of Maxwell's poems are rarely what they seem to be. "Like the minimalist sculptors we have learned to admire without their theories mattering anymore, these poems have pure, ephemeral lines that suggest much thought about time and utterance, yet they float free without any need for explanation. This can happen partly because Maxwell has an inspired sense of the look of the page. If you wanted to blur on her words, you would still see beauty, harmony and space" -- Fanny Howe.

Realm Sixty-Four

Literature & Fiction

Maxwell, Kristi

Poetry

Ahsahta Press

The notion of exchange circulates throughout Kristi Maxwell’s superlative second collection of poetry, Hush Sessions. In a series of utterly unique poetic experiences, things transform or transfer: superstition becomes science, and bodies become texts to read. In addition, family mythologies become sites of substitution and a borderland where irrationality and rationalization touch. Kristi Maxwell’s poetry reminds us that words, like objects, do not exist in a singular state, and their multiplicity is activated through perception: “a veil during/ the trying on rather than the pride of/ the dress.” As Fanny Howe says, Maxwell’s poems “have pure, ephemeral lines that suggest much thought about time and utterance, yet they float free without any need for explanation.”

Hush Sessions

Saturnalia Books

Fiction. PLAN/K, in the spirit of piracy and pilfering, incorporates anagrams and puns, figures of speech that are often considered base or crude, tying them to popular representations of pirates, and figures that disrupt language as a system of exchange, rerouting meaning, much like goods were rerouted through piracy's disruption of colonial trade routes. Other sections consist of "transcriptions" of popular and scholarly works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling. In these poems, Maxwell "boards" the aforementioned works, and textual violence ensues as she repurposes the materials of language to explore issues of reading, gender, power, and the tension between violence and play.

PLAN/K

Mud Luscious Press

Poetry. Following in a long line of acts of piracy by women writers (Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates), Kristi Maxwell proves herself a masterful ventriloquist. Slipping her hand into through a card game (Royalty), a children's book, historical documents on sea pirates, and Treasure Island, Maxwell speaks, strikes, through double entendres, puns, homonyms, and jokes—all the devices scorned by the 'original' pirates of linguistic, cultural and political power. PLAN/K—not only Dickinson's plank but also Maxwell's (and Kafka's) plan K (plans A-J always go awry)—engenders alternate subtexts, defrocks priests and denudes emperors: '['where are your manners' 'where are your manners' 'inflected' 'infected' 'affected']) but reads as a He by her mother's (Design / Deceit [by her knowing the Signs by which a Pete is Mister-ed and Sir-ed (Served vs. Serfed)]).]' Meaning radiates in all directions, refusing and submitting to the lure of narrative, the drive to annex: ''Frontier Thesis[:] [...] Turner's funda (men)tal orientation [turner] to the land.' Though Maxwell sets sail with the infamous pirate(ss) Mary Read, PLAN/K is less a 'whole lotion to cross' than perpetual Brownian motion in the Petri dish of culture, a nervous twitching of semantic, syntactical and grammatical categories. It is also a book sounding the bottoms: ''Gen-Hur on a cherry-it a char[ge]iot (c [as see]-h[e]r-riot!) Mary Read, the woman compelled by her mother to deceive in order to live: '[Mary Read has no Reed (read: Penis; read: Man- Oar).' Oar-less, Maxwell takes a leap—is pushed from the PLAN/K. And adventure begins."—Tyrone Williams

Horse Less Press

Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between unlikely terms—highlighting the very notion of exchange between the linguistic and the physical realm. Maxwell’s poems are both generous and demanding. While the operating intelligence behind the poems incessantly questions how one makes a life in language (and vice versa), the poems themselves enact arrangements that might make such pathways possible. These restless and inventive poems provide feats of language that lead us to agree with Maxwell’s speaker when she says: Our awe is our confession.

That Our Eyes Be Rigged

Poetry. With robust syntax and a sense of humor, BRIGHT AND HURTLESS is committed to the discoveries made in the wild of association and remains optimistic about transformative powers made evident by language. Here, ear intersects with eye, intellect intersects with feeling, and different methods of paying attention and knowing the world are brought into contact. Invested in the unit of the word, these poems explore how a glance turns into a ricochet--what anchors, what upends, what morphs, and what remains.

Bright and Hurtless (The New Series, 88)

Ecopoetic at its core, Kristi Maxwell’s My My is concerned about the world, “that abundant stray,” and scrutinizes the messiness of humans’ relationships to each other and to the nonhuman—how acts of seeing can lift up or erase. Maxwell’s seventh book operates under the sign of “or,” testing out alternatives and revisions in the hopes of landing on a truth that can be lived with. Part-sigh, part-sly, these poems make friends with their own shiftiness and recognize that the imperfect might be the best place to look for our next c(l)ues.

My My

Saturnalia

Goners

Green Linden Press

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

Books by Maxwell, Kristi

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

Realm Sixty-Four

Hush Sessions

PLAN/K

PLAN/K

That Our Eyes Be Rigged

Bright and Hurtless (The New Series, 88)

My My

Goners