These Figures Lining the Hills

Alice Attie

 

5 x 8.5 inches, 80pp. November 2015

ISBN : 9780857423047

Rs  495.00 (HB)
$21.00 (HB)
£14.50 (HB)

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The bird is perched. The stone is placed. The books are open. Words float and settle: they roll onto the page as stones roll in the landscape. They invoke the event of themselves. Alice Attie's voice is exquisite and singular as she writes from thresholds where speech and silence are bound, from places where language extols its own effort.

 

Attie's inaugural poetry volume is a brilliant and delicate invitation to collectively 'bend into silence as we bend into words'. Here, language and the ineffable inhabit the same liminal space, where words may both 'be and not' in an oscillation of possiblity and wonder. As she observes the motions of her mind, Attie shapes and reshapes figures to form and reform the collage of her writing. 

 

As we read These Figures Lining the Hills, we enter an eloquent, philosophically poignant space of reciprocity where together 'we slip into the folds' of language. Dazzling tributes to the poetics of our time, Attie's words are posied to 'take note' as we, refugees on this earth, wander and 'tremble the horizon', arriving and departing, in rhythms of triump and defeat, again and again and again. 

Alice Attie is an artist and a writer. Her works on paper are ink drawings, often composed of words. She has been photographing for many years and been widely published. Her book Harlem on the Verge documenting the transformations of Harlem, New York, was published in 2001. Seagull Books has published her photographs along Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s text in Harlem (2013).

 

Poetry