Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
Amaranth Borsuk, USA
| Sunt Lacrimae Rerum;
Amaranth Borsuk, Seattle, USA, 2013 In homage to and in mourning for the street of booksellers, this book takes its title from Aeneas's words of sorrow uttered before a mural depicting the Trojan War. Tragedy must be brought home to us, but how can we relay the depths of loss - a very idea predicated on absence? This reliquary is part lachrymatory: it contains a book whose text of tears is designed to tear away at itself each time the book is displayed. Pleated into an accordion, it plays the elegy for its own effacement as, gradually, the cut-out letters catch on one another, pulling themselves up and off the page until they may fall away entirely. Not only is the book's texture designed to transform, its text does as well: page-by-page, one letter of the phrase changes at each turn. Although “these are the tears of things,” over time we might enter a space “where all the tears embraced.” Edition of 12, 3” x 3” x 3”. Paper and acrylic box Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), and, together with programmer BradBouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and recently served as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT, where she taught classes in digital, visual, and material poetics. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Offending Adam, and Harp and Altar, among other journals, and she is currently at work on a critical book, “The Upright Script: Modernist Mediations and Contemporary Data Poetics.” Her collaboration with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher, Abra, recently received an Expanded Artists' Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and will be issued as an artist's book and iOS app in fall of 2013. She currently teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell. www.amaranthborsuk.com |