by Amy Sara Carroll
Amy Sara Carroll's Secession is a breakthrough album of poetry, art, theory, and more from the West Coast's leading publisher in the avant-garde, Hyperbole Books.
Holly Hughes writes that Secession is a "luscious and challenging book" that "evokes the different meanings of secession... [Carroll's] knowledge of the complicated roles that femininities have played in this country's ongoing racial dramas, informs the work, as does a girlhood spent on the border of Texas and Mexico, where questions of nations, maps, and belonging linger. But there are other meanings of secession invoked in this collection, meanings that have a progressive ancestry. Second-wave feminism and early lesbian culture were haunted by the dream of seceding from the patriarchy, and similar aspirations shaped other social change movements. And, while the dream of secession came to be dismissed as naïve or worse in the late twentieth century, contemporary theorists like Jill Dolan and José Muñoz are excavating these leftist secessionist moments and taking a second look at their utopian foundations." Hughes adds that Carroll "flirts with secession on an aesthetic level, as a way to resist the false separations we've created between the word as it exists on the page and as it exists, embodied, on the stage, as well as the separation between the word as text and the word as image."
Secession is the first volume in the Bi Sheng/Juan Pablos Digitovisuo Artifacts series, Hyperbole Books' new publishing line that bridges the semantic and the semiotic.
