Thrown

Poetry. Art. Poems by James Wagner; paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger. Includes 17 pages of full-color artwork. Eight years after James Wagner's TRILCE (Calamari Press), a work of surreal and disjointed loops, neologisms, and disarming sparks, comes THROWN: sixty-six lyrical, emotive, and elusive poems written within the otherly atmospheres of eleven paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger. THROWN is, on the surface, an ekphrastic encounter between the art of one of the most spiritually and psychologically penetrating minds of the present, and a poet who has moved fearlessly into the destabilizing realms of certainty and identity, while enveloped in the multi- contextual slippages of sense-making. Beyond the surface, we are in the fray and the frayed, into a world where the saying so and the proof of the saying so are one and the same.

Ettinger and Wagner together reverberate Being, isolated before fate. What strikes me irresistibly is the appearance of the Thing-in-itself, whirling around inside the work, mercurially noumenous.--Lissa Wolsak

In this terse, elegant collection of poems, James Wagner attends to the act of experiencing in the unfinished impermanence of understanding and explores the unstable grounds of affective experience. Like Bracha Ettinger's layered images, which potently suggest a thickening of sense while blurring and sometimes canceling object representation, Wagner presents us with enigmatic constructs of thought, affective and analytical thought-decreations delicately positioned at the edge of sense.--Carla Billitteri