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Local History
"Erica Hunt's LOCAL HISTORY blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip."--Harryette Mullen Poetry. African American Studies.
- GenresPoetry
73 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 14, 2025
from The Order of the Story
15 ‘Imagine yourself walking into a room the exercise suggests, and then, describe how you fill the doorway, the direction you dress in, the way you walk out of the frame. Imagine finding stones — the inscriptions that predicted you. Invent the language now. Invent the language as if each inflection belonged to you instead of containing you, or treating you as if you were a commotion in the path of progress.
Invent a language to describe the doorway in the person.’
from cold war breaks
21 ‘A person in history, we don’t know what that means; we have only the social remains, a current preoccupation. A person in history is a person from the past.’
22 ‘Work is overcoming resistance, to push past the sense that there’s nothing left to do, it’s all been written before’
from Surplus
57 ‘Equals the difference between beginning to wake up and beginning the day. Surplus equals the bystander beside her own accumulated memory. Surplus equals the pause before the day’s contents are anticipated in detail that overspills its container. Surplus equals the day through an open door, the relics of dream littering the bed, antecedents before they are doctored by conclusions.
She listens to herself telegraph. What cracks, emotions overlap?’
from Verse
61 ‘Every story has its campaign to win.
Missing numbers, interfering digits.
We work from the beginning to the back
end tracing where the author left her
prints on the text, her surplus
divinity. And when the right word
appears out of nowhere
it leads back here.
What word were we looking for?’
from Woman, with wings
71 ‘Work is pushing past resistance,
past the sense
it has all been written
before, spilling off the inventory shelves.
Sometimes you can read
with the headlights on, sometimes
you can drive to moods for which
no correlates exist, only curves, shaded
paths in the wilderness, occasional plots of
land ignored by absentee owners.’
15 ‘Imagine yourself walking into a room the exercise suggests, and then, describe how you fill the doorway, the direction you dress in, the way you walk out of the frame. Imagine finding stones — the inscriptions that predicted you. Invent the language now. Invent the language as if each inflection belonged to you instead of containing you, or treating you as if you were a commotion in the path of progress.
Invent a language to describe the doorway in the person.’
from cold war breaks
21 ‘A person in history, we don’t know what that means; we have only the social remains, a current preoccupation. A person in history is a person from the past.’
22 ‘Work is overcoming resistance, to push past the sense that there’s nothing left to do, it’s all been written before’
from Surplus
57 ‘Equals the difference between beginning to wake up and beginning the day. Surplus equals the bystander beside her own accumulated memory. Surplus equals the pause before the day’s contents are anticipated in detail that overspills its container. Surplus equals the day through an open door, the relics of dream littering the bed, antecedents before they are doctored by conclusions.
She listens to herself telegraph. What cracks, emotions overlap?’
from Verse
61 ‘Every story has its campaign to win.
Missing numbers, interfering digits.
We work from the beginning to the back
end tracing where the author left her
prints on the text, her surplus
divinity. And when the right word
appears out of nowhere
it leads back here.
What word were we looking for?’
from Woman, with wings
71 ‘Work is pushing past resistance,
past the sense
it has all been written
before, spilling off the inventory shelves.
Sometimes you can read
with the headlights on, sometimes
you can drive to moods for which
no correlates exist, only curves, shaded
paths in the wilderness, occasional plots of
land ignored by absentee owners.’
April 5, 2021
I really really love prose poetry I'm realizing
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews