Thursday, April 23, 2009

Now out from Otoliths — Quaternity, by Scott Glassman & Sheila E. Murphy



Quaternity
Scott Glassman & Sheila E. Murphy
284 pages
Cover Design by K. S. Ernst & Sheila E. Murphy
Otoliths 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-1-7
$16.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/quaternity/6783753
In Quaternity, Scott Glassman and Sheila E. Murphy ask, "...and what divination will rhetorize the oppositorum / attract the needed nightshade / counter pull assume high produce / to be revered osteo"? Do you understand the question? Whether you reply Yes or No, the point is that the excerpt can be understood to be a question. How? Through the push and pull of its music. Quaternity asks the reader to trust in words — the word itself and not what it supposedly signifies. For the word itself can be a musical note and it can suffice (more than suffice!) that certain combinations sing. The dictionary bows to Glassman and Murphy's seductive diction: "No curve to infinity can mimic bells." —Eileen Tabios

These collaborative pages elaborate vocal colors and chord-changing arrangements of sensory elision: musics of meaning. Quaternity is "lubrication-lit," aglow with the sensual pleasure of its making. Glassman and Murphy court rapture "where frogleaps suture kismet vines." —Tom Beckett

In Quaternity, Glassman and Murphy cease to make the usual "third thing" of collaboration – art and meaning immanent in shared composition – the end. Let the third be words and process, this material book, or tent camping, and start the box step waltz of four: author, author, writing, lunge. —Catherine Daly

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