ManyPenny Press is pleased to announce the release of TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis. This work spans roughly 15 years of the authors efforts in both textual and visual writing. It is Vassilakis’ first full-length book.
TEXT LOSES TIME
Afterword by Nick Piombino
188 pp.
ISBN-10: 0-9798478-0-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798478-0-6
AUTHORS STATEMENT:
This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word however arranged contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto-historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City in 1963. He has co-written and performed a one-man play about experimental composer Morton Feldman. Vassilakis is co-founder and curator for the Subtext Reading Series and editor of Clear-Cut: Anthology (A Collection of Seattle Writers). He has been a guest-editor of WOS#35: Northwest Concrete and Visual Poetry and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. In 1998, Vassilakis co-produced, with Rebecca Brown, a 24-hour Gertrude Stein-a-thon. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review. He works for Fantagraphic Books and lives in Seattle with his son, Quixote.
BOOKS:
Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (g o n g press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others.
DVD:
CONCRETE: Movies (Sub Rosa Press)
CONTACT AND ORDERING INFORMATION:
ManyPenny Press
1111 E. Fifth St.
Moscow, ID 83843
$15.95 + $2 postage
Make checks payable to Crag Hill
(Pre-orders will be sent post-paid)