About the Author Is Dead
By (Author) Pascalle Burton
Introduction by Bella Li
Cordite Publishing Inc.
Cordite Publishing Inc.
1st March 2018
Australia
Paperback
82
Width 152mm, Height 221mm, Spine 8mm
68g
About the Author is Dead is another kind of 'I' a 'space of many dimensions' opened out by its varied contents. The title a portmanteau of the two part titles within shows how a seemingly singular entity can deceive, can undergo fission and reveal itself as multiple. Yet, awareness of the fluency with which Burton moves between screen and page, stage and keyboard, gives a sense of how she approaches the act of authorship: as experiment, as play and, most importantly, as the cultivation of an open field into which multiple texts may float and fuse to become new substances.
'Paul Bowles said 'whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so.' The poems here connect with nerves in bodies, pixels on screens, letters in words and the air's water content. There are unwitting dialogues with texts gone before; texts that have floated into the spaces I travel online, on a bookshelf, in a dream, a film, another country, on the television.
I process them < > they process me.
They mingle with the ways I experience social and political currents (somewhere between solid and liquid: despair and hope). I try things, and sometimes something happens.
Now, these poems float in this book for you to process < > for them to process you.' Pascalle Burton
Pascalle Burton's work has an experimental / conceptual approach, and has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Australian Poetry Journal, Clan Analogue, Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, SOd and V+L-A=K. . Her projects include books, UN/SPOOL with Nathan Shepherdson, 7" vinyl, The Outlandish Watch with Shepherdson and David Stavanger, a zine series, Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own, performance, 24 Hour Gym with Tessa Rose, audio-collage films, Generation Loss (after Alvin Lucier) and playing in the band The Stress of Leisure. the voice you speak with may not be your own, performance, 24 Hour Gym with Tessa Rose, audio-collage films, Generation Loss (after Alvin Lucier) and playing in the band The Stress of Leisure.