Symptom of Color

by Michelle Naka Pierce

Symptom of Color is an excerpt from Continuous Frieze Bordering [Red], which documents the migratory patterns of an Other: the hybrid as she travels between countries, languages, identities, and shades of red.

Cover art: fount capacities by Sue Hammond West

Review:
http://allegrezza.blogspot.com/2011/0...

Genres: Poetry

20 pages, chapbook/e-chap

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, awarded the POL Editor's Prize (Fordham, 2012); She, A Blueprint, a text/image document with collage art by Sue Hammond West (2011); Beloved Integer (2007); and co-author of TRI/VIA with Veronica Corpuz (2003). She has lived in Yokohama, Japan; London, UK; and currently teaches writing at Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where she is the director of the Jack Kerouac School.

Interview: http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Summer08/...

Reviews

[Michael Palkowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the opening sentence "As you sleep metaphorically, you try to understand the dorsal aspect of this once removed zone, just beyond the city." Which is preceded by a quote from Judith Butler. It's contextually rich exploring language like a boat where you can ontologically find yourself and others in the unexamined syllables and secreted diphthongs etc. It's almost like a post structuralist imagining where vowels are engaged in diaspora and binaries re-appropriate themselves and seem fluid. Some sentences don't read brilliantly like:

"They want to strip you of your clothes [when you are twelve] where no
lies violence."

and could probably have done with edits of some kind. The use of space and the textual layout is something I also didn't like but the work itself is rather solid allowing the subaltern to speak?

[Michelle Naka Pierce]

I have copies available for trade.