after the great death by Tamsin Blaxter
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First electronic edition
ISBN 978-1-989668-03-0
Praise for after the great death:
Tamsin Blaxter’s after the great death is a remarkable little book – remarkable as an exercise in textual intervention, as commentary on the work and function of translation, and also as poetry. The textual apparatus and partial translation force the reader to go looking in a largely foreign text for familiar words and for the poems, which appear as footnotes, like waypoints on the uncertain journey through the text. It’s a unique and intelligent volume that both requires and rewards readerly attention.
In after the great death, Blaxter delves into a fantastic lyric consciousness that places the reader in the writing itself, conjuring the tangible experience of history lived. One leaves these pieces and is haunted by the living world touched by death and the manner in which witnesses unpack that touch, both in simple fact and in the lyric way the mind unpacks reality.
after the great death inventively transforms fourteenth-century records of Norwegians who confronted the plague with a series of footnotes that provide personal histories in haunting verse vignettes. Blaxter’s writing is at once up-front and many-layered; the tender, plush language resists formal categorization, finally fractured by the phonemes and punctuation that attempt to encompass trauma.
Featuring cover art by Kailee Wakeman
Scroll down for an excerpt
First electronic edition
ISBN 978-1-989668-03-0
Praise for after the great death:
Tamsin Blaxter’s after the great death is a remarkable little book – remarkable as an exercise in textual intervention, as commentary on the work and function of translation, and also as poetry. The textual apparatus and partial translation force the reader to go looking in a largely foreign text for familiar words and for the poems, which appear as footnotes, like waypoints on the uncertain journey through the text. It’s a unique and intelligent volume that both requires and rewards readerly attention.
- Jeremy Luke Hill, publisher at Gordon Hill Press
In after the great death, Blaxter delves into a fantastic lyric consciousness that places the reader in the writing itself, conjuring the tangible experience of history lived. One leaves these pieces and is haunted by the living world touched by death and the manner in which witnesses unpack that touch, both in simple fact and in the lyric way the mind unpacks reality.
- D.A. Lockhart, author of Devil in the Woods, The Gravel Lot That Was Montana, This City At the Crossroads, Because We Have All Lived Here, and Big Medicine Comes to Erie
after the great death inventively transforms fourteenth-century records of Norwegians who confronted the plague with a series of footnotes that provide personal histories in haunting verse vignettes. Blaxter’s writing is at once up-front and many-layered; the tender, plush language resists formal categorization, finally fractured by the phonemes and punctuation that attempt to encompass trauma.
- Emily Osborne, author of Quarrel of Arrows: Ten Poets from Medieval Norway and Iceland and Biometrical
Featuring cover art by Kailee Wakeman
Scroll down for an excerpt
Excerpt: "after the great death 6"
from DN III.298, 22nd of January 1359
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1 there is a torrent p passing
we too m might be g g ground
th that w we
th the
th tor
o how’d we not seen it b before that year
2 in cleaner times, who would dispute a c co
in cl times, a cor kro corps
who would d d dispute the word of the passed, once, yes, b but
but that was before we became s so common
or the t water passing
3 so death makes misers of us
so misers make for happy undiers
every penny trickling back to us so us s s few
so de s so ha
ha happy undiers we
we too m might be g g ground
th that w we
th the
th tor
o how’d we not seen it b before that year
2 in cleaner times, who would dispute a c co
in cl times, a cor kro corps
who would d d dispute the word of the passed, once, yes, b but
but that was before we became s so common
or the t water passing
3 so death makes misers of us
so misers make for happy undiers
every penny trickling back to us so us s s few
so de s so ha
ha happy undiers we