Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. 2010 Finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award in Transgender Literature. Venn Diagram Productions is the collaborative intersection between Belladonna* and Litmus Press. This imprint actualizes our mutual commitment to publishing innovative, cross-genre, multicultural, feminist and queer work by writers and artists working beyond and between borders.
This writing is the New Brave. Few writers have so given in to the entropic forces that disentangle our bodies in the end, while at the same time furiously pooling social content into observable patterns. And there are thousands! Millions! Billions! In biological systems, DNA nucleotides are linked by enzymes in order to make long, chainlike polynucleotides of defined sequence. In writing, the sub-social is linked by signs that make ringlets of undefined sequence. Only we can think to make thought from it. It cannot be conceived of in advance. It cannot be found on the web. No se vende ni se compra. edwards's radical neo-communitarian impulse is something that's blood-borne, but not bloody, something that's keen & observant, but not oculocentric. Like Antonin Artaud, edwards sought to make Writing = Life.--Rodrigo Toscano
Radical rishi poet-seer-sage kari edwards's stunningly powerful and erudite essay-rant-manifesto-'swarm of / messages' calls a nation of docile bodies to account: 'no more... protecting the audience from / exploding stigmatas, tracer bullets and the / shit of the dead.' Deploying lyric thrust 'to detonate the heart, ' blown bodies, categories and lines enact new 'delicious fractal' social contracts for reducing suffering in the body public/private and generating 'growth in the sky of mind.' Read this book and you'll never go back.--Rachael Zolf
This is one of the most important books for me right now. I find myself rereading passages like songs I NEED to listen to over and over for the messages to be integrated into my life.--CA Conrad
This text which is not one. That's how I think of kari edwards' work. In terms, I mean, of an environment of separations, assertion, and yearning. Bharat jiva constitutes a realm of recognitions, pleas, prayers, rants, indictments. It's a book-length poem of many registers (a kind of multimodal mosaic yoga, really) where 'even doubt' will 'build walls faster than regulatory principles.' I won't try to explain away. I can only point... edwards' work reminds one of what art is supposed to do: raise questions, and problematize experience.--Tom Beckett
BHARAT JIVA [is] a penultimate comment on the banality and glimmering potential holdout of humanity. Philosophy of philosophy, planetary biological religious cosmic consideration afloat on the tension of gerunds manifesting without always an I, yet I speaks ('did I not say').--Cara Benson
