Speech - by Jill Magi (Paperback)

About the Book

The author's deftly woven book-length poem questions the existence of universal individual rights such as speech and citizenship, especially in relation to borders--both national and linguistic.stic.

Book Synopsis

Comfortable neither with the self who is made entirely through autonomy or genealogy, SPEECH tracks the western-world idea of freedom, asking whether the person who believes they can say and write whatever they want is more free or less aware of the nature of free speech as a right everywhere. Formally, SPEECH invokes the action of walking and weaving: enjambed lines that accrue, building pages vertically through repetition of sound, syntax, and metrical patterning. In the book, a woman walks, threading her way through a cityscape that overlays west and east, here and there, past and present, self and other, creating a place and person neither and both.

Review Quotes

"In SPEECH, both kinds are deconstructed, speeches throughout history are woven in and reflected upon, speech as a given, as a 'right, ' is pushed against as an assumption, speech of the powerful versus those marked invisible, speech of different kinds: written, verbal, animal and sonic gestures are all carefully considered in this wide torrent of investigatory lyric."--Jennifer Firestone, Tarpaulin Sky

"The poems reach through conflict, crises and trauma for solutions but hold no solutions but the obvious, that we should be better to each other, and for each other. Why aren't more readers listening?"--rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog

"Magi deftly explains how race, class, sex and sexuality are ranked in our world's radical system, at once tough and fragile. Her words invite us to reach up to the glass ceiling, knock on it, and consider carefully what doors open for us."--Bethany Mary, VAGABOND CITY

"It is unsurprising to learn that Magi is also a weaver, knitter, and sewer. You feel this quality in the way her impossible citizen walks--or, better yet, weaves--through the city, pulling its various histories and injuries into this text. A true cosmopolitan may, perhaps, be a loom. Maybe Magi's impossible citizen isn't not possible, but rather, her ways are unrecognized. Her manner is to create."--Samantha Neugebauer, Ploughshares

"Reading Jill Magi's newest poetry collection SPEECH is like going for a walk inside someone else's dream...SPEECH is not just a cognitive mapping of a Middle Eastern city, but the unveiling of how one ingests a physical space and attempts to produce a poetic response--a simple act of speech."--Hunter Augeri, The Carolina Quarterly

"Whether on paper or textiles, Magi's writing has always been in touch with its being an image, or to be more precise, deeply in touch with its potential to move in and out of being an image. When I say 'being in touch' I mean the touch part literally--the hand stitching words into belabored embroidery. SPEECH again makes visible its process of passing words through the body; this time, it is a moving body, 'walking along with the others' whose movements stitch curves and diagonal embellishments on the surfaces of 'two cities of middles: ' Middle America and the Middle East. Magi is an incomparable guide to these in-between spaces, to 'the gap [that] is never silent' between words and images, manual and intellectual labor, citizen and guest-worker, guest and host."--Cristina Vatulescu

"SPEECH is reflection, part-history, mined with precision and care. It is research/commentary: about hope, dread, life! SPEECH is language, what cities and paperwork have turned people into, what simmers beneath. Ultimately, SPEECH is Magi: sleuth, seeker, writer, walker."--Deepak Unnikrishnan

"Jill Magi's timely and politically engaged poem, SPEECH, ruptures social dependence on coherent structures of understanding and organization toward more ethical figurations. In language that is unsparing, relentless, and precise, Magi carves an experimental trajectory, touching along the way: the violence of classism, racism, sexism, xenophobia; the brutality of environmental exploitation; the excruciating trap of poverty; the intolerable sorrow of exile and migration; the fraught question of citizenship. Magi slides seamlessly between temporalities and geographies; this collection could refer as much to a stratified United Arab Emirates as to a divided United States. It is in the smudged borders, in the third spaces, as Magi discloses, that potential freedom, agency, community, and overlooked beauty reside. SPEECH takes us there, and we are relieved to discover that such a space may indeed exist, if only, for the moment, in words floating down like feathers, with the promise of a future materialization." --Mai Al-Nakib

"The 'impossible citizen' of Jill Magi's latest book circulates through border checkpoints, through nation-states, through invisibility and 'speech removal, ' ultimately becoming a figure that carries and is carried by global continuums of neoliberal violences: continuums of violence that allow us to see how all the countries are terrible in ways that both erase and amplify specificity. How language generates meaning and meaninglessness is at the heart of Magi's stateless poetics, which radically interrogates discourses of public and private, of race pitted against class, of how we live with the erosion of social services and the public sector, among other ideas. Magi's SPEECH asserts that poetry ought to ask the question of how we survive amid the brutalities of nationalism and its rhetorics, of how we survive in a world that is always on fire."--Daniel Borzutzky

About the Author

Jill Magi works in text, image, and textile and her books include Threads, Torchwood, SLOT, Cadastral Map, LABOR, SIGN CLIMACTERIC, and a monograph on text-image entitled Pageviews/Innervisions (Rattapallax/Moving Furniture Press). Recent work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pheobe, and Rivulet. In October of 2017 Jill blogged for the Poetry Foundation, and in the spring of 2015 Jill wrote weekly commentaries for Jacket2 on "a textile poetics." Her essays have appeared in The Edinburgh University Press Critical Medical Humanities Reader, The Force of What's Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-garde, The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and The Eco-Language Reader. Jill has been awarded residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace program, the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center, and has had solo shows with Tashkeel in Dubai and the Project Space Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi. For her community-based publishing work, Poets & Writers magazine named her as among the most inspiring writers in the world in 2010. Jill teaches in the literature/creative writing and visual arts programs at NYU Abu Dhabi where she joined the faculty in 2013.