Poetry

By Jennifer K. Dick

OUT NOW

That Which I Touch Has No Name is dialogic, an attempt to unearth the equilibrium between the blank page and the self in urban and rural places. This multilingual, polyphonic book is an inking, a verbal construction, gnawing away at its own predecessors, at the way we read, and at language itself. It asks: “What holds up, contains, structures, leaks out of our pages, our selves?” The singularity of plural experience, and the plurality of singular experience, infuse and are infused by these dazzling, shape-shifting pages.

Jennifer K Dick is the author of Lilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt 2019), Circuits (Corrupt 2013) and Fluorescence (Univ of GA Press 2004) as well as six chapbooks/artbooks.

"Sounding the unsoundable in the most capacious ways in this gathering of exquisitely engineered texts, Jennifer K Dick queries memory—memory as the conversation that is the mind, memory as the architect of time. And throughout, she's sounding sound as well, exploring its depths and ranges, using its momentum to cover great stretches of human experience, from the mythical beginnings of art to the individual's daily life amid
endless war to the sight of an albino raven on a windowsill. The potential for
connection—of connecting the disparity and dispersal that reigns all around
us—radiates from these works, in which language foregrounds promise and constructs possibility." -  Cole Swensen
 
"It is appropriate that this collection has an English publisher as Jennifer K Dick writes an expansive poetry in ways similar to the Romantic exploration of the borders and fields of imagination and vision. Attentive to process, fragment, science, mythology, desire, identity politics, redefinition and neo-Platonist echoes, Jennifer K Dick’s strange multilingual poems take the reader on a journey with other voices… Her poems breathe and speak in a manner recognisable to a young reader of Coleridge in that they seek to make connections that are utterly alive and contemporary. They are a life force." - David Caddy

"In That Which I Touch Has No Name, the extraordinary new book by Jennifer K. Dick, words are “sought out like lovers/groped in the night.” These are sensual poems that unsettle our foundations: how we name, or are named, how we are erased or remembered, and the resulting confusion that ensues. These poems are dialogic, where the body is constructed and deconstructed, where one can be exchanged or morphed into an other. What does it mean to be a self in transit, seeking the traces of the other, when selves are changing/shifting; a reflection, a refraction, a commingling of voices and languages, so that being and vocabulary are untranslatable; what then? Memories are traced, retraced, and languages run into and through one another. The poems here are serious but playful, yielding numerous pleasures for the eye and ear, “the way one action ricochets and recalls another.” Jennifer K. Dick is a poet of acute intelligence and perception who refutes all reductions and makes for fascinating company." —Eléna Rivera

"May existence, buoyant beyond fact, come past what’s read/heard?  The difference of two spheres culminates in a paradox, for “a pea can be...reassembled into the Sun.”  Should poetry resketch phenomenology in its own image, toggling—north & south, found languages & dead, sound & stasis, the pleasure of place almost without language (Section III)–among opposing terms?  This book says Yes. But, blessed Reader, if you need a work to be about one thing, then first read section IV, “Convexities,” (where the book’s philosophical and sonic imperatives distill into singular bitter swallows) and then follow this with the collection’s first section, “A Certain Protocol” (risking every description, all at once?) as a single idea."—Steve Willard