Winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize The poems in Jena Osman's first volume embody the poem as performance, revealing the tensions between narrative coherence and Brechtian self-consciousness, and our constitution by "characters" of all types. Playful, mysterious, and challenging, The Character is for anyone interested in the inscription of power by means of language.

The Character (Barnard New Women Poets Series)

Literature & Fiction

Osman, Jena

Poetry

Beacon Press

Public Figures is an essay-poem with photographs and text that begins with a playful thought experiment: statues of people in public spaces have eyes, but what are they looking at? To answer that question, Jena Osman sets up a camera to track the gaze of a number of statues in Philadelphia―mostly 19th century military figures carrying weapons. How does their point of view differ from our own? And how does it compare, say, to the point of view of other watchful military figures, such as drone pilots? In this book, Osman combines the histories behind these statues with poetic narratives that ask us to think about our own relational positions, and how our own everyday gaze may be complicit with the gun-sights of war. Public Figures illustrates how history is transformed, and even erased, by monuments and other public records of events. Through poetry, those histories can be made visible again. Check for the online reader's companion at http://publicfigures.site.wesleyan.edu.

Public Figures (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

Poetry. "AMBLYOPIA is an invitation to a new architecture, where spaces are construed with artifacts of the mind-favorite haunts, obscure discoveries, longings, persons and objects--as well as vital responses to the habitat it creates. Each gesture leaves a trace 'representing a kind of revolution or paragraph on a relatively fragile topic.' The writing is precise and lush. That we get to follow Jena Osman into her theatre of invention is an exhilarating pleasure of the first order"--Ann Lauterbach.

Amblyopia

Avenue B

Underwater Dive: Version One

Paradigm Press

A Very Large Array: Selected Poems

DABA

A thread throughout Adam Pendleton's paintings and installations is an attraction to language's capacity to shape existing realities and inaugurate new ones, and to allude (references to Conceptual art, Punk and experimental poetry abound). ELTDK covers two large bodies of new work (eight new Black Dada paintings and the System of Display series) plus two essays and an interview with the artist.

Adam Pendleton: ELTDK

Arts & Photography

Beasley, Mark

Individual Artists

Haunch of Venison

"Jena Osman subjects American history to a rhizomatic genealogy. What she finds . . . are the foundational, intersecting forces of slavery, finance, and empire at the heart of new world settlement."—Michael Davidson
A practitioner of socio-literary engagement continues her investigations in this network of connective texts.

The Network (National Poetry Series Books (Paperback))

Literary

Fence Books

Poetry. Fiction. A look at the constitutional history of corporate personhood in the United States. Although the Supreme Court Case Citizens United vs. United States has recently brought this issue into the spotlight, the concept of granting Constitutional rights to corporate entities began soon after the Civil War. CORPORATE RELATIONS tracks the constitutional rights granted to corporations, culling language from landmark Supreme Court cases. At the same time it investigates a shaky analogy: if corporations are persons, what are persons? machines?

Corporate Relations

Burning Deck

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. MOTION STUDIES consists of three essay-poems that begin as meditations on 19th century science and end firmly as research into the present. From chronophotography to algorithmic surveillance, from phrenology to fMRI brain scans, from Victorian specimen collections to the bleached bones of the Great Barrier Reef, each poem in this collection explores technologies of knowing each other and the world we're in.

Motion Studies

Essays & Correspondence

Ugly Duckling Presse

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Books by Osman, Jena