Thursday, January 07, 2010

Out from Otoliths—nick-e melville's selections and dissections




selections and dissections
nick-e melville
128 pages
Otoliths 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-4-8
$14.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/selections-and-dissections/7440802
This is poetry from within an international concrete-typographic tradition to which it pays respect as a means of placing itself precisely in its own distinct take on language. Gide said most good writers have their own specific sense of irony, and that’s one of the things nick-e melville shows in the work here. But by irony is not meant that commonplace smart-arsedness of British literary middleclass detachment and defence; on the contrary this is a way of viewing and engaging that is basic, delicate, and political. — Tom Leonard

What nick-e melville creates within selections and dissections is text as experience, presenting us with different ways to look at visual language, different ways to understand the ubiquitous textscapes of daily living. The pages of this book are filled with games, but games of the most serious kind, games about the act of being sentient textual beings. Melville, a textual imagineer, examines the spaces between letters, the negative spaces between lines of text, and even the halftone atoms of printing, always looking for the surprise in the printed text. To read this book is to experience these acts of textual imagination as cinema, as vibrant and moving sequences of thought. — Geof Huth

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