Bough Down by Karen Green
One of the most beautiful expressions of love and loss you will ever read. Bough Down put me in mind somehow of the Portuguese fado: a lament rendered so precisely it becomes luminous and affirmative. This is a profound, lovely, bitterly funny book that fulfills the first requirement of great art: it is magical.
—George Saunders
It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages … The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement.
—Maggie Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books
With fearlessness and grace, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the urgency and inscrutability of a world shaped by love and loss in this unusual narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with miniature collages. She charts her passage through grief with poetic precision, a startling sense of humor, and an acute awareness of the volatility of language. Punctuating the text and made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world, the collages are not meant as illustration but as a parallel process of invocation and erasure, pilfering and remaking. Each collage—and the creative act of making it—evinces the reassembling of life. Bough Down is a book of dualities, probing the small spaces between lucidity and madness, desire and ambivalence, the living and the absent. It is is a lapidary, keenly observed and composed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.
HB / 188 pages / 56 color illustrations / 36 USD
Book signing and reception at 192 Books in New York (192 Tenth Avenue), Friday, May 31, 7–8 pm. Space is limited. RSVP 212 255 4022.
Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas by Denis Wood
Second expanded edition with an introduction by Ira Glass, essays by Albert Mobilio and Ander Monson, interview by Blake Butler
The book is unlike anything I’ve ever seen … a volume that is beautiful and informative and that encourages us to see the world in different ways.
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
That a cartographer could set out on a mission that’s so emotional, so personal, so idiosyncratic, was news to me.
—Ira Glass, from his introduction
Iconoclastic geographer Denis Wood has created an atlas unlike any other. He surveys his small, century-old neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina by first paring away the inessential “map crap” (scale, orientation, street grids), then by locating the revelatory in the unmapped and unmappable: radio waves permeating the air, the paperboy’s route in space and time, the light cast by street lamps, Halloween pumpkins on porches.
His joyful subversion of traditional cartography forges new ways of seeing not only this particular place, but also the very nature of place itself. In pursuit of a “poetics of cartography,” these elegant maps attune the eye to the invisible, the overlooked, and the seemingly insignificant making the experience of place primary.
The maps have a traditional rigor, but they also have “fingerprints”—a gamut of subjective arguments about the relationships between social class and cultural rituals, about the neighborhood as “transformer,” about maps’ impermanence and fragility—rejecting the idea that they convey a single, static, objective truth. Together, they accumulate into a multi-layered story about one neighborhood that tells the larger, universal story of how we understand and define the places we call home.
PB / 152 pages / 97 b/w illustrations / 32 USD
Siglio is an independent press in Los Angeles publishing uncommon books that live at the intersection of art and literature.
