In a Trance is just the sort of genre-defying work we at Peanut and punctum and, as it happens, Jeffrey Skoblow, revel in. It is a book-length essay by a fiction writer. It is a fictional essay by a literary scholar. It is a gallant assay by a smart man who thinks while he walks, and he walks a lot.  The book is a meta-meditation on Paleolithic cave drawings and the humans who ponder them. It is fact-based and entrancing just as the cave drawings are actual (existing in time — loosely — and space — more definitively) and mesmerizing. Skoblow is devising stories as “we” (humans) have always devised stories though in a less familiar mode, along a less travelled path.  The essay draws on (!) the careful/thoughtful/whimsical notebooks kept by Skoblow over a dozen years. The notebooks record/illuminate/complicate his visits to twelve Paleolithic art sites as well as his deep, eccentric reading of texts concerned in some way with the subject of cave drawings by an array of scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, art historians, and other sundry enthusiasts and experts, so-called and otherwise.  I saw the caves and didn’t know what to do with them. So I started writing in Spring ’01 to try to figure it out. The first words I wrote were “The caves themselves.” A few pages later: “The caves, no doubt, blah blah blah. To find a way to talk about them: impossible.” It wasn’t going well.  These are one man’s marks made about making marks. Skoblow’s meticulous descriptions attempt the impossible: to provide the “information” that will allow us to see what is visible, invisible, restricted, unseen, hidden, and lost (in the sense of not yet found, or destroyed, or degraded by human presence) beneath the ground at El Castillo and Niaux (for instance). Lines, dots, dashes, body parts, animals, and “hum-animal” figures — things/creatures we have given name to (bison? rhino? vulva? phallus?) in our helplessly homo-sapien-centric attempts to understand (and/or to master our non-understanding).  The Great Being would appear to be an androgynous figure, or rather, an ungendered figure almost mistakable for a skull, all the matter of a few deft lines: a slightly crumpled egg-shaped braincase with no representation of hair or other individualizing features, an overlarge eye and a blunt nose, a mouth curving in a long slow grin, maybe, of stupefaction or benediction, benign and spooky all at once.  Here is a leaping mind.  We follow Skoblow as he steps onto an electric train in the caves at Rouffignac and steps out in Southern Illinois, where he cautiously crosses a snake-ridden (maybe) meadow. This is where he meanders further — literally and figuratively: further from the actual caves, furtherest from certainty. These furtherings are exactly what we might expect from a book that from its opening pages declares as one if its themes the difficulties inherent in considering Paleolithic art.  It is problematic … for reasons having to do with the nature of representation and, no doubt, the mysteries of sentient experience. There is also the problem of expectations and intent: to whom does one speak about the caves, and for what purpose?  The pleasures of this book are found in Skoblow’s intense, vigilant exploration of these problems and questions, which are in themselves irresistible. Who are we? In what ways, specifically, and to what degree do we resemble these ancient humans who spray- and brush-painted, smudged, carved, and stenciled images into and onto cave walls and floors and ceilings?  Signs emptied of meaning, a kind of dream, a salve and a reassurance, possibly terrifying, too. A plunge into signs.

In a Trance: On Paleo Art

Arts & Photography

Skoblow, Jeffrey

History & Criticism

Peanut Books

"If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art." (Dean Young, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems)
"Anthony Opal’s series of unrhymed (or off-rhymed) sonnets begins with a prayer to everything or anything — from a lower case 'god' to a 'compassionate sloth' and a 'homeless zoo keeper.' In these poems reverence and rebellion, desperation and control joust. Then they dance. Opal’s lines are consistently surprising (if that’s possible) and, more important, they make me believe them." (Rae Armantrout, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize)
"Anthony Opal’s keen and restless observations, flickering with medical and theological emergencies, Old Testament visitations, Jackson Pollock, hippos and bird wings, can’t help but remind me of the nature of opal itself, with its glittering internal structure that refracts light mediated by its elemental inclusions and substrates. In wrestling with his sonnet-angel, Opal wins." (Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common)
ACTION — as in begin, genesis, motion — is a collection of poems ultimately concerned with form, those lines drawn in the sand that give way to the profanity of the holy, the holiness of the profane. Throughout ACTION, Opal engages the constraints inherent to seemingly fixed forms. From living with rheumatoid arthritis, to feeling for the edges of a sonnet tradition, to wrestling with the tenets of historical theology, this collection demonstrates that the only way to honestly submit to a form is to rage against it. However, to assume that this rage is not a kind of explosive joy—a Barthesian jouissance—would be to miss the point of poems that Dean Young has described as “radiant affirmations of life and art.”
"'I write sonnets empty of everything yet containing all things …' goes a visual and philosophical echo of the unutterable 'G–d' ACTION interrogates, prods. Such slippery refrains drive this lively book’s composition and arguments. Birds fall throughout, echoing the rough descent of haloed, winged things; the speaker wrestles an angel by a river and, in a later poem, a father by a sink; prophets stumble about stripped of epic context, conscripted to a world of Doritos bags, iPhones, and prescription meds. Indeed, religion and the sacred’s place in the contemporary are on Opal’s mind. For as much as, say, 'Out of the Whirlwind' might aver otherwise, these adroit and contemplative poems don’t only fuck with 'ideas of the holy,' they seek them out." (Douglas Kearney, author of Patter and The Black Automaton)
"Opal’s eye mocks its own seeing. With a 'strange mercy that pulls us inward,' these poems glint from the threads tethering private myth to a larger one. Taut with hope and balancing a heavy humor, this is language carved of a voice that wants to shout lullabies: 'I want to sing / a song to myself in the silence of / myself.'" (Emily Kendal Frey, author of Sorrow Arrow and The Grief Performance)

Action

Literature & Fiction

Opal, Anthony

Poetry

There have been many iterations of the Joan of Arc story: "testimonies," books, and films have attempted to capture the drama of one of history's most famous gender warriors. But few, if any, have been undertaken by an author who met her subject matter with such recognition and insight, a fellow warrior, a rebel in kind. kari edwards, a transgender activist and key figure in the Bay Area experimental writing scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, was provocative and prescient in her concern for the way that language inflects, inflicts, and regulates gender norms. Her persistent efforts to break linguistic binaries and barriers have given her texts an ongoing urgency after her untimely death in 2006.This book brings to life an important document discovered in the late poet's archive at the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo. The several notebooks and partial typescript (as well as various plans and notes) of edwards' unfinished manuscript, uncovered by Tina Zigon, offer an intriguing glimpse of a major new direction in edwards' work, one in which her avant-garde instincts are channeled through rigorous research on this medieval figure. In this retelling - better to say "remixing" - of Joan of Arc's fateful trial and martyrdom, we find the major theme so richly laced throughout edwards' oeuvre: the courageous (but also depressingly mundane) struggle against the stifling regulation of language, appearance, and norms. edwards's Joan of Arc, even in its incomplete and abbreviated form (which Zigon calls a "possible version" of edwards's manuscript), offers an exciting engagement with one of the medieval period's most challenging and mysterious figures.

doNrm'-la-pusl: part of the joan of arc project

Edwards, Kari

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

Books by Peanut Books