Anarch.
Frances Richard
“This collection of poems addresses the fundamental question of our time: what is it to be human? If we are strange to each other and ourselves, then how do we know it? What is strangeness if not a recognition of something we can recognize? We can no longer see the earth (especially from the sky) as unaffected by all our experiments, hurled down, trashed, in pursuit of happiness. Frances Richard goes to the material roots of our search and turns away, and takes off, after another purpose. This book has the spirit of anthropology and philosophy, and also reveals the underlying structures of these two disciplines as a problem for artists to solve. Why? Because if words go down with the rest, and lose their light, we are really finished. Richard is doing what poets are asked to be doing now.”
—Fanny Howe
“Frances Richard’s Anarch. is a geology of linguistic quirks that recombine the gobbets of our world with clarity and mirth. Lines sound the certainties of science (rocks and processes 'drunk on the liquor of difficulty'), then playfully slip on neologistic terrain. Here, a poem is a hopeful structure, a plastic flow of solids set into motion by a subatomic rhizome of “intraquarky layers.” Anarch. is a serious pleasure.”
—Jena Osman
“The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in Anarch. are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Richard’s mind might be said to sublimate her learning, to throw off into her work the spirit of science, mingled with its grosser parts.”
—Lytle Shaw
About the Author
Frances Richard is the author of The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008) and Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008). With Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi she is co-author of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a member of the editorial teams at Fence and Cabinet magazines, and her writing on visual art has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, The Nation, BOMB, and in exhibition catalogues from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Independent Curators International; she has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She lives in Brooklyn.
Additional Links
Interview with Anne Waldman, BOMB magazine
Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, The Conversant
Interview: with Andy Fitch, The Conversant
Frances Richard as “Featured Fig” at Les Figues Presse
“Odd Lots” Gordon Matta-Clark show & catalogue page, Cabinet magazine
Reading at Small Press Traffic from I'll Drown Your Book: Conceptual Writing by Women
“This collection of poems addresses the fundamental question of our time: what is it to be human? If we are strange to each other and ourselves, then how do we know it? What is strangeness if not a recognition of something we can recognize? We can no longer see the earth (especially from the sky) as unaffected by all our experiments, hurled down, trashed, in pursuit of happiness. Frances Richard goes to the material roots of our search and turns away, and takes off, after another purpose. This book has the spirit of anthropology and philosophy, and also reveals the underlying structures of these two disciplines as a problem for artists to solve. Why? Because if words go down with the rest, and lose their light, we are really finished. Richard is doing what poets are asked to be doing now.”
—Fanny Howe
“Frances Richard’s Anarch. is a geology of linguistic quirks that recombine the gobbets of our world with clarity and mirth. Lines sound the certainties of science (rocks and processes 'drunk on the liquor of difficulty'), then playfully slip on neologistic terrain. Here, a poem is a hopeful structure, a plastic flow of solids set into motion by a subatomic rhizome of “intraquarky layers.” Anarch. is a serious pleasure.”
—Jena Osman
“The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in Anarch. are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Richard’s mind might be said to sublimate her learning, to throw off into her work the spirit of science, mingled with its grosser parts.”
—Lytle Shaw
About the Author
Frances Richard is the author of The Phonemes (Les Figues Press, 2012) and See Through (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks Anarch. (Woodland Editions, 2008) and Shaved Code (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008). With Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi she is co-author of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” (Cabinet Books, 2005). She has been a member of the editorial teams at Fence and Cabinet magazines, and her writing on visual art has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, The Nation, BOMB, and in exhibition catalogues from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Independent Curators International; she has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She lives in Brooklyn.
Additional Links
Interview with Anne Waldman, BOMB magazine
Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, The Conversant
Interview: with Andy Fitch, The Conversant
Frances Richard as “Featured Fig” at Les Figues Presse
“Odd Lots” Gordon Matta-Clark show & catalogue page, Cabinet magazine
Reading at Small Press Traffic from I'll Drown Your Book: Conceptual Writing by Women
