Continuous Frieze Bordering Red

Poets Out Loud

by Michelle Naka Pierce

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko's red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these "invisible" cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at "home." She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither] [nor] [both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko's Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up." The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to "acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed" so that she is not held to false measures of "purity." Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of "hybrid" and embrace the monstrous self.

Genres: Art, Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

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

[Chris]

For those who love to be astonished.

[Jai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE THIS BOOK. I LIVE INSIDE IT. I AM A FUCKING HYPHEN. READ MY REVIEW AT LANTERN REVIEW: http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/201...

[Stacie Cregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book from the Goodreads First Reads program.

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red is a poem. The book itself is wide, and the pages are mostly blank. Each page contains five lines, which, after a couple of false starts, I discover read across, not down. The first line of the first page continues on the first line of the second page. The abundance of white space kind of bothered me at first, until I realize that it's necessary, the words don't get lost in any extraneous art or illustrations.

I enjoyed this one. The language is beautiful, and the occasional Japanese words and phrases made me smile. Well done.