Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Poets Out Loud (Fup))
"Interruptions mingle with saturations, private intensities with social commentary, lyric aperçus with skeptical suspicion-this multi-track work by Michelle Naka Pierce correlates many streams of insight and produces elegant and self-assured results."-RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS"Inspired in different ways by Mark Rothko and Judith Butler, Pierce contemplates what it feels like to be outside of her skin. Her speaker moves through bodies--both literal and figurative--and Piece seems to pose the question: If each part of your identity can be disassembled, can the self, the identities we place and take off like clothes, also be put back together again?-The Brooklyn Rail" . . . An absolute joy to keep turning the pages, to stay in motion with Pierce, to be always already moving/across."-Asian American Poetry Unbound"One of the most compelling features of the book is the fact that it can be read through in two different ways: line-by-line down each page, as is conventional, or line-by-line across pages. . ." -The Constant Critic"Michelle Naka Pierce brings grace, intricacy, intelligence, and surprise to these topics as she investigates her place(s) within internal and external places."   -Rain Taxi"Its concepts and executions are gorgeously rendered. . . " -Rain Taxi"Michelle Naka Pierce lovingly situates what the GPS will never register: the body among borders (one from the Other), the language of bodies on borders (one from the Other), the border that comprises skin (one from the Other). All bodies, borders, and tongues are permeable: "The hue: all the lines, the interrogation, the sullied plexiglas" between. Minding the gaps, "against identity," the body moves across a border, "the object of Asiaphiles"; and moves through time and nation (tendons, penetrable, scar tissue, accent, visa, dead). This stunning study abandons Locke's consciousness, embodying Butler's alterity "at the place where I expect to be myself." Dump MapQuest and hop aboard this lovely ride." -Kass Fleisher"Michelle Naka Pierce's Continuous Frieze Bordering Red is a deeply personal investigation of hybridity, from the perspective of the mixed-race child of a Japanese 'immigrant mother' and a white 'citizen father.' The 'hybrid offspring' inhabits a double negative, 'not that which is not white' and yet 'as white as a non-white girl can get'; she can 'no longer stand under the deluge of selves.' Pierce's text is a brilliant chronicle of the struggle to 'embrace your incongruent parts, to sketch a shelter out of fragments.' The work's innovative form unfolds in time and space, encouraging both horizontal and vertical reading, opening up a new space for hybridity that is 'Not directionless: polyvectorial.'" -Timothy Yu"Interruptions mingle with saturations, private intensities with social commentary, lyric aperçus with skeptical suspicion--this multi-track work by Michelle Naka Pierce correlates many streams of insight and produces elegant and self-assured results." -Rachel  Blau DuPlessis"My Favorite moment of this text are the moments that break out of the cumbersome form that Pierce commits to like a concrete swimsuit." -Make Shift Magazine"Continuous Frieze Bordering Red is a tour de force. It is inviting, exciting, immediately accessible and so elegantly turned that it's inevitable, like an equation that generates infinite possibilities in a just-discovered universe."-Drunken Boat