A Prank of Georges
A convoy, a motley, a mob of machines. Machines? By George! Gertrude Stein cranks the motor, and we're off to the carnival, the roller-coaster ride across genres, languages, typefaces and names. American names especially, where Wilson may come from Witkiewicz and castle from Katzenellengogen. It's dazzling. It's a riot. It self-deconstrcuts, but it won't disappoint you. - ROSEMARIE WALDROP --BackmatterFor William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game tht leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of "various sorts of talk" through which "the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain." Together these writings return us to the primal force of language: naming. -- SUSAN HOWE --BackmatterIn A PRANK OF GEORGES, Abigail Lang & Thalia Field create a dazzling set of variations in, about, and around lines from Gertrude Stein. Stein's lines become threads with which Lang & Field weave a text heterelingual and ludic, in which the play of names becomes a matter of meaining's performing. The question here is not what the poem says but how it keeps on keeps on saying. --CHARLES BERNSTEIN --Backmatter