In The Slipstream: An Fc2 Reader - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573660809 ISBN 13: 9781573660808

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 1999

Synopsis

Thousands of poets from across the Americas have recited their works on the stage of the Guild Complex, Chicago's internationally renowned, cross-cultural literary center. The anthology "Powerlines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex," celebrates the first ten years of the award-winning literary center and its publishing wing, Tia Chucha Press, through the words of some of the poets who provided the artistic foundation upon which the organization was built. Every week at the Complex poets from every imaginable layer of society open themselves up to the audience. They lay their hearts and minds on the stage for strangers and friends to inspect. They pick apart the world around them. They extend themselves and search for answers and questions in a communal ritual called a poetry reading. Their words mix Dow-Jones averages with turned out blues, revolutionary chants with appeals for love, outrage at injustice with razor-sharp satire, a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo protesting racism and war, a child's cry against abuse, the meaning of a cicada's sleep, and joy in the sound of a B-flat note. In isolation, the millions of words that have been spoken at the Complex simply hang and then dissipate. But there is an accumulative meaning in the array of voices and ideas that have flowed from the stage. "Powerlines" makes sense of a decade of words.

Poets include Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Quincy Troupe, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, Reginald Gibbons, Kimiko Hahn, Elizabeth Alexander, Ana Castillo, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhubut, Patricia Smith, David Hernandez, Michael Anania, Sterling Plumpp, Martha Vertreace, Jack Hirschman, Paul Hoover, Cin Salach, Diane Glancy, Richard Jones, Eugene Redmond, Rohan Preston, Afaa Weaver, Martin Espada, Wanda Coleman, Lisel Mueller, and many others.

About this title

About the Author

Luis Rodriguez is the founder of Tia Chucha Press and the author of "Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A." His most recent book of poems is "Trochemoche" (Curbstone Press, 1998).

Michael Warr is the founding executive director of the Guild Complex. He is the author of the poetry collection "We Are All the Black Boy" (Tia Chucha, 1991) and a recipient of an NEA fellowship for poetry.

Julie Parson-Nesbitt is a founding member of the Guild Complex and a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poet's Award. Her most recent book of poems is "Finders" (West End Press, 1996).

Reviews

In 1973, a group of frustrated American writers, united in their disgust with trade publishing, founded the Fiction Collective, an organization dedicated to finding and publishing ``worthwhile fiction outside of the impoverished commercial taste of mainstream publishing.'' For the next 25 years, the Collective has suffered decided economic and critical ups and downs, identity crises, and a name change (to FC2). They have survived all of this, and have now issued an anthology of excerpts drawn from the books published by the Collective over the past quarter century. The twenty-nine pieces provide a useful survey of the varieties of experimental writing in the US, ranging from stream of consciousness (Richard Grossman, ``Alphabet Man'') to the surrealistic (Constance Pierce, ``When Things Get Back to Normal'') to the aggressively postmodern (John Shirley, ``New Noir'') and to the incendiary (Samuel Delany, ``HOGG''). Most of the writers here, though (Gerald Vizenor, Fanny Howe, Mark Leyner, Rob Hardin, Steve Katz, Marianne Hauser, et al.), defy easy categorization. They have in common only a willingness to alter the definitions and intentions of fiction. What they have produced ranges from the puerile to the masterful, and, in its variety, the anthology offers a useful (and unsettling) introduction to the vital byways and back alleys of modern fiction. Libraries should have it, and more adventurous readers should seek it out. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573660809
• ISBN 13: 9781573660808
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 410
• Editor: White Curtis, Sukenick Ronald