G
Emmalea Russo
Praise for G
"In a debut of prose poems that approach language by turns as abstract or as deeply representational, interdisciplinary artist and writer Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a “Nervous disorder.” ... The poems on the right-facing pages feel as if they have fallen from the spaces in the more fragmented poems of the left. As Russo writes, “Some things drop down into what space is cleared for,” before revising this sentiment when she writes later, “What we continue to clear is G.” Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness."
—Publishers Weekly (Full review)
"‘G is a garden and seems simple,’ we’re told early on in this disarming, charming, and alarming book. With its text cleaved in two across right and left pages, G reads like an exchange between garden plots and the gardener’s journal—neither of which remains simple or simply wholesome from up close, when you’re in the weeds. It’s this up-closeness that rewards, transforming an air of levity into an air of suspension, or suspense: who or what is this G, really? (Who or what, finally, isn’t?) Russo’s writing, a peculiar marriage of compression and splay, embeds a germinal weirdness in the fallow page, and waits. The results are like certain mushrooms fruiting, unassuming to look at but potent with magic: ‘a hindrance open.’"
—Anna Moschovakis
"Follow it wherever it leads and let go of expectation about what a poem is. It’s a scary gift with a complex and intricate structure."
—Jen Bervin
"It is tempting to call G a meditation on perception, but it’s always-already clear-eyed: often, when the figure meets ground, the actual ground is already the figure, and Emmalea Russo understands these illusory but changeable optics (and her chosen medium) as much as her writing has lived and centered them—grounded, yes, by (tenderly) performed intimacy, tide, earth. G, a letter, lest we forget, too falls from geological time; and the poet’s linguistic figuring, seeing, breaking, and tending speak less to the reader than they do water her (during ambrosial hours, so that we do not burn). The work recalls, for me, Carla Harryman, Renee Gladman, Peter Greenaway’s reflective H is for House; but Russo’s responses to how 21st-cen. life interrupts and materializes fenestration (!) act as shelves in multiple Gs—where one might sit as if on a lover’s lap—and so become truly themselves: 'Some things drop down into what space is cleared for.'"
—Corina Copp
About the Author
Links
Livestream video: Anna Moschovakis and Emmalea Russo (McNally Jackson Books)
A Review of Emmalea Russo's Multiple G (Harriet, Poetry Foundation)
The Energy Between Words: Emmalea Russo Interviewed by Ariel Yelen (BOMB Magazine)
Rob Mclennan on Emmalea Russo's G (Rob Mcclennan's blog)
Spaces on the Edge: An Interview with Emmalea Russo (Michigan Quarterly Review)
Praise for G
"In a debut of prose poems that approach language by turns as abstract or as deeply representational, interdisciplinary artist and writer Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a “Nervous disorder.” ... The poems on the right-facing pages feel as if they have fallen from the spaces in the more fragmented poems of the left. As Russo writes, “Some things drop down into what space is cleared for,” before revising this sentiment when she writes later, “What we continue to clear is G.” Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness."
—Publishers Weekly (Full review)
"‘G is a garden and seems simple,’ we’re told early on in this disarming, charming, and alarming book. With its text cleaved in two across right and left pages, G reads like an exchange between garden plots and the gardener’s journal—neither of which remains simple or simply wholesome from up close, when you’re in the weeds. It’s this up-closeness that rewards, transforming an air of levity into an air of suspension, or suspense: who or what is this G, really? (Who or what, finally, isn’t?) Russo’s writing, a peculiar marriage of compression and splay, embeds a germinal weirdness in the fallow page, and waits. The results are like certain mushrooms fruiting, unassuming to look at but potent with magic: ‘a hindrance open.’"
—Anna Moschovakis
"Follow it wherever it leads and let go of expectation about what a poem is. It’s a scary gift with a complex and intricate structure."
—Jen Bervin
"It is tempting to call G a meditation on perception, but it’s always-already clear-eyed: often, when the figure meets ground, the actual ground is already the figure, and Emmalea Russo understands these illusory but changeable optics (and her chosen medium) as much as her writing has lived and centered them—grounded, yes, by (tenderly) performed intimacy, tide, earth. G, a letter, lest we forget, too falls from geological time; and the poet’s linguistic figuring, seeing, breaking, and tending speak less to the reader than they do water her (during ambrosial hours, so that we do not burn). The work recalls, for me, Carla Harryman, Renee Gladman, Peter Greenaway’s reflective H is for House; but Russo’s responses to how 21st-cen. life interrupts and materializes fenestration (!) act as shelves in multiple Gs—where one might sit as if on a lover’s lap—and so become truly themselves: 'Some things drop down into what space is cleared for.'"
—Corina Copp
About the Author
Links
Livestream video: Anna Moschovakis and Emmalea Russo (McNally Jackson Books)
A Review of Emmalea Russo's Multiple G (Harriet, Poetry Foundation)
The Energy Between Words: Emmalea Russo Interviewed by Ariel Yelen (BOMB Magazine)
Rob Mclennan on Emmalea Russo's G (Rob Mcclennan's blog)
Spaces on the Edge: An Interview with Emmalea Russo (Michigan Quarterly Review)
