Furniture Music
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€19.99
In Furniture Music, Montreal legend Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art.
Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. And the author is less a single voice than an assembler, ventriloquizing not only present voices but also a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.
Gail Scott is the author of Permanent Revolution (Book*Hug Press, 2021), which was a finalist for the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, Spare Parts (Coach House, 1981), Heroine (Coach House, 1987, re-issued in 2019 with an introduction by Eileen Myles by Nightboat), Main Brides (Talonbooks, 1993), My Paris (Dalkey Archive, 1999), Spare Parts Plus Two (Coach House, 2002), and The Obituary (Coach House, 2010; Nightboat 2012). Her essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs (Womens Press, 1989) and in La Théorie, un dimanche (1988) which was translated into English as Theory, A Sunday (Belladonna, 2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, 2004). Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le désarroi du matelot was shortlisted for a 2001 Governor General’s Literary Award.