Pages: 104
          
                              
            ISBN: 9780819571359
          
                              
            Pub Date: April 2011
          
                                                            
                                          Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
                                    
                              
            Illustrations: 20 illus.
          
                    
                Price:
      
                £18.50
            
  
          
          
          
                          In stock
                      
        
            Pages: 104
          
                              
            ISBN: 9780819574343
          
                              
            Pub Date: February 2014
          
                                                            
                                         Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
                                    
                              
            Illustrations: 20 illus.
          
                    
              Price:
      
                £11.95
            
  
          
          
          
          
                          In stock
                      
        
          Description:
      
      
        Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies-showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence-not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at http://thingscomeonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/
      
            
        Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies-showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence-not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at http://thingscomeonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/