[New-Poetry] announcing (with apologies for cross posting)

[cris cheek]

cris cheek
part: short life housing

This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK- 
born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of  
the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s — the so- 
called “linguistically-innovative poetry” grouping later  
anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke’s Floating  
Capital: New Poets from London. Likewise, he became central to  
developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant  
distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a  
prolific, genre-slipping figure: poet, performance artist and  
musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual  
project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles  
Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been  
relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which part: short life  
housing goes far to rectify.

At the heart of this book are two long sequences, previously  
unpublished aside from short extracts: “canning town chronicles,”  
a scathing set of verbal accretions that emerged from the wreckage of  
the Thatcher era; and “f o g s,” a series of typestracts quarried  
from verbal improvisations recorded during outdoor walks in densely  
foggy weather. Also included are several shorter pieces, including a  
selection of early 1980s work and “plain speaking yet,” cheek’s  
memorial to the novelist Kathy Acker. The poems have, in keeping with  
the author’s concern for the specificity of occasion and  
publication, been revised and visually reimagined with this volume in  
mind.

*

For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and  
playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing  
consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few  
poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as  
cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the  
reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move  
towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.
— Carla Harryman

Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an  
artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of  
the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and  
composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his  
pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is  
a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of  
industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art  
lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the  
thatcheritic city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed  
and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink  
splashes of this great volume.
– Caroline Bergvall

“i s   y o u r   t o n g u e   a   g l o m / w e a p o n   t h a t    
s t a i n s ?” cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space.  
After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a  
series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often  
actually is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay  
homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin  
Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work  
functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and  
in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the  
public sphere, “w h e r e   o t h e r s   f e a r   t o / t / r e a  
d.”
— Peter Manson

*

cris cheek, part: short life housing. The Gig, 2009. ISBN  
978-0-9735875-5-5. 270pp, 6″ x 9″, perfectbound.

ORDERING INFORMATION (with a special deal!)

Within Canada: $22.50 — Within the US: $22.50 US
UK: £17 — Euro: €22
All prices include postage.

A special deal: for $8 Cdn / $8 US / £5 / €7, add one of the  
following:

     * Slant, the canning town chronicles, sound&language (CD with  
cheek, Sianed Jones, Phillip Jeck — music based around texts  
collected in part: short life housing, as well as a reading of a  
Kinks tune…!)
     * cris cheek, the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents)
     * Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada
     * Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles
     * Allen Fisher, Entanglement

Please make out cheques to “Nate Dorward”, & send to:
109 Hounslow Ave, North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
(email: ndorward [at-sign] ndorward [dot] com)