“It was more like an impressionist portrait than an identification photo” writes Sarah Mangold in I Meant To Be Transparent, a book woven through the writing of early 20th century literary innovator Dorothy Richardson and the contours of contemporary poetics. Taking her title from a line in Robert Duncan’s Ground Work, Mangold’s attempted transparency slips original language between filmic jump cuts that mirror Richardson’s own prose and a near pre-raphaelite interleaving of fore and backgound — bringing the silenced, the skirted, the sidelined into view. By troubling the implications of linguistic transparency, Mangold challenges the literary portrait in a world in which “men and women are taught from the beginning to speak “his”” and likewise suspending the space before “feeling fades into thought –” In this hovering between, Mangold brings into focus the woman at the edge of the party with “Lots of big big revolution behind my eyes” and the ways in which the failure to be see-through becomes its own revelation.
FROM NOW ON, ALL PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF PRINT-ON-DEMAND BOOKS IN THIS SERIES WILL BE DONATED TO A DIFFERENT SMALL PRESS EACH YEAR. First up: Chax Press. So, any purchase of a print-on-demand title from this series during 2011-2012 will have the added benefit of helping to support the efforts of Chax!
Please visit the LRL e-editons site at http://littleredleaves.com/ebooks/ to download or purchase these titles. And as always, you can contact us at littleredleaves@gmail.com for information about reviewing these books or adapting any of our titles for a class.
Little Red Leaves/LRL e-editions: