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Review Text Loses Time

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Oct. 28, 2010 By paul baker
I really enjoy this book. Nico's work is amazing.
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Oct. 15, 2009 By Crag Hill
"Geof Huth: Longhand into Tiny Notebooks I Carry for Months: Fragments towards a Review of Nico Vassilakis’ Text Loses Time"
What Nico Vassilakis’ new book Text Loses Time, just out from the newborn ManyPenny Press (child of Crag Hill), does is show us what a book of poetry by a visual poet must always be: an edifice that holds textual possibilities of all kinds. This is a book of visual poetry, textual poetry, prose poetry, and sound poetry (the texts for same).

Nico works in each of these modes in this single book. His visual poems are often wordless, or almost so, or virtually so. His sound poetry scripts are visual and aural, often to the point of nonsense, to the point... More > of listening to the human voice, unsung, as music. His poetry would be lyrical if that didn’t demean them. The poems work on a principle of fragmentation. Glimpses, flashes, instances of language appear and flicker away, replaced by another enigmatic phrase, but each of these is held together with a sinew of sense and sense of direction that propels us through them even as we do not know where were are going. And his prose poetry almost recreates his lineated poetry, but not quite: its words surge en masse accumulating in size, growing, expanding, ballooning into sense, enchanting with their audacity.



Unexpectedly, this thick book opens with a sequence of visual poems under the title “Porto Middled.” Each of these poems is a poem for the eye. Nico has taken images of text, distorted in various ways, cut them into squares and present two to a page, one atop the other. These are tiny akilter dyptichs that lead us to think of visual art, that provide almost no real textual matter, but which remain textual, which recall a meaningful textscape we cannot recreate. These are the ghosts of printed language, regimented. We know they have meaning, but we can not know what that meaning is any longer. Nico has torn and twisted language apart to find a more beautiful way.

Find the complete review at: http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/10/longhand-into-tiny-notebooks-i-carry.html < Less

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Product Details

ISBN 978-1-4357-2157-9
Copyright Standard Copyright License
Publisher Crag Hill
Published June 25, 2008
Language English
Pages 188
 
Binding Perfect-bound Paperback
Interior Ink Black & white
Dimensions (inches) 7.5 wide × 7.5 tall

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Poetry