Gaze

by Marthe Reed

Poetry. In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, GAZE explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other. Rikki Ducornet says this about these intersections in "In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny." What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to "become." Kate Bernheimer says of GAZE, "'Too beautiful to articulate'--dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. GAZE at them; go blind inside this mentalist's mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind."

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Marthe Reed is the author of five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014), Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely Books 2013), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fifth book of poems will be published by Lavender Ink in Fall 2014. She has also published chapbooks as part of the Dusie Kollektiv, as well as with above / ground press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed's collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest and will appear in 2014. She is Co-Publisher of Black Radish and the Editor/Publisher of Nous-zot Press chapbooks.

Further information about her work can be found at Lavender Ink:http://www.lavenderink.org/content/au...

and at Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marthe...
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mxr5675/ and at the publishers for (e) bodied bliss http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html and for Gaze: http://www.blackradishbooks.org/Reed....

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marthe Reed’s Gaze is an inherent and vital part of what she notes in her book to be “the new pastoral.” The way it un-veils by way of what I would name slow desire. What are the emotional paces of desire (which is every reason to stay)as an action—and further as an activism? Gaze gains slits of perspective by way of the longevity of its looking. I am wooed by the way it holds me to what it perceives. Almost cradling me in conjunction with the bodies, shapes and accoutrement it pursues.
These poems are a cupping--are fragments of the embrace.


What I am continually delighted and wracked by in Marthe’s work, are the moments that both pull and push at once, as one--which I see as a unifying or a solidarity of the “velvet helms”--places and relations so beautiful and painful that they are worth more than a single or surface glance--they require Gaze.


Truly Marthe makes view by way of her “lost calligraphy” (a gesturing by way of ink where dissection and non- desertion can combine). I appreciate the persistence of Marthe’s beautiful and essential work, as it inhabits and keeps us on the junctures just prior to the rational or the decisive. I thank directly, the power of this work.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, one Louisiana poet tried to imagine an autopoesis, or writing-reads, that allows Arabic and Farsi their place in English and yet also takes responsibility to her own strange attractors among subjects: "a swash of seeming through which she 'appears'." It is certainly to be on the edge of faith to say: "Beauty consists in this, in the ability to doubt."

[Black Radish Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first Black Radish book! Available soon from SPD.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaze is up at NewPages as a "New and Noteworthy" book

http://www.newpages.com/book-reviews/...

[Zack]

very dark fascinating complex book. i enjoyed looking up and learning lots of words specific to arabic culture and clothing and fencing. i liked how it was connecting war with veiling.