Partial Derivative of the Unnamable

by Divya Victor

Chapbook of conceptual prose.

40 pages, ebook

First published November 5, 2012

About the author

Divya Victor is the author of Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, 2014, winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2015), Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922 (GaussPDF, 2014), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (GaussPDF, 2012), PUNCH (GaussPDF, 2011), and the Partial trilogy (Troll Thread, 2011-2012). Her chapbooks include Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and SUTURES (2009). Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, the reedition of bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, Hobo, VLAK, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2, among other venues. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Mandeville Poetry Collections at University of California San Diego, and a writer in residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (LACE). She lives in the United States and Singapore, where she is assistant professor of poetry and writing at Nanyang Technological University.

Reviews

[Margaret Devadason · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book sets up a fairly simple structure: prose on the left side, question and blank lines on the right. The question invites, generally, the reader’s response - here, as if working through a sum, the reader is perhaps invited to take the partial derivative of the prose. The question reframes the prose each time - as object or objects, as promise, as schedule-disruptor. The prose itself has a repetitive, hypnotic quality, seeming to express the same idea over and over again. My moment of awe/delight/entry to the text, which drew me in beyond appreciating the structure in itself, came near the middle of the book, with the piece entitled Edges - I recognised it as a biblical story, and the repetitive nature of the text suddenly came to feel like reading a concordance of different translations of a single bible verse. I started reading the book again with that as a fresh point of access, and was better able to appreciate its rhythms. Really enjoyed this experience.