Siren (Some Poetics) - by Quinn Latimer & Sarah Demeuse (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poetics as artistic practice and world-making: practitioners from Bernadette Mayer and Sky Hopinka to Liliane Lijn and Shanzhai Lyric explore the wilder, parapoetic shores of language

Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional thinkers and artistic contributors, SIREN considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm.
Contributors include: Ruth Estévez, Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, Don Mee Choi, Anaïs Duplan, Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, Christa Wolf and Dena Yago.

Review Quotes

Assembles media-spanning work from the 1970s to the present to explore poetry in the expanded field, a form of language-making that - like the Sirens' song - traffics in the unknowable and unutterable.--Cassie Packard "Frieze"

In a sense, the imagined grotesquerie of the Homeric Sirens was yet another way for patriarchs to repress the ambivalence of other voices. These artists claim the possibility that an incantation could be so powerful.--Travis Diehl "The New York Times"

Instead of situating the siren call as a sound that is only perceptible by and exclusive to humans, Latimer posits a mode of listening that is metaphorical, contingent--and at the same time, often pleasurable.--Wendy Vogel "Art Agenda"

Produces a profoundly sensual experience in which reading, looking, listening, and moving become one...No artificial cohesion has been enforced, no top-down epic narrative exerted, but harmonies and resonances have been found, creating polyphony.--Elvia Wilk "4Columns"