Unexplained Presence

(Paperback)

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In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mis-en-scnes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's DarlingPatricia Rozema's Mansfield Parkand Virginia Woolf'sOrlandoAs Pulitzerprize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved.

Reviews

For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheralAfrican-American characters in film and other mediacharacters who seem tobe there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid orFranois Ozon's 8 Femmes but end up loaded with multiple, conflictingmeanings.Publishers Weekly

Bryants essay title also captures the way radical writing (not just writing) seems to have become, for some poets, a synonym primarily for poetry, eliding a great deal of radical drama, nonfiction, and fiction, to say nothing of cross-genre prose.Jacket2

What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.San Francisco Bay Guardian

Author Bio

Tisa Bryantis the author ofUnexplained Presence(Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, 2024), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility,The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, ofWar Diaries, an anthology on black gay mens desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Sun Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthologyLetters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD's "School of Prince" event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at "Speak Nearby," a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshops year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working onThe Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema.Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.