some author activity: hastain, Price, Baker, Blouin + Downs,

j/j hastain and Juliet Cook have some new collaborative work up at tenderness, yea; Katie L. Price is interviewed over at Speaking of Marvels; Jennifer Baker was interviewed earlier this year at Aella's blog; Michael Blouin has a new essay up at my (small press) writing day; and Buck Downs is featured at Medium as part of rob mclennan's Spotlight series.

some author activity: Beaulieu, Price, Cook, Archer + Reed,

"At a Distance from One's Own Body: A Conversation with Derek Beaulieu and Katie L. Price" is now online at Hamilton Arts & Letters; Sarah Cook has a new essay on Anne Sexton over at many gendered mothers; forthcoming author Sacha Archer has some new work up at h&; and Marthe Reed is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

Katie L. Price: Poetry & Practice: Perspectives on Medicine and Narrative WSU

above/ground press author Katie L. Price (author of the 2015 chapbooks Sickly and BRCA: Birth of a Patient) tomorrow afternoon at Washington State University!

"This may seem tangential to our class at first glance. However, Katie L. Price has a very interesting project to turn the information contained on her medical records into poetry. In formal terms, the project shows how restructuring information—from documentary form to poetic form—can alter its meaning in dramatic ways, even if the data stays the same. The process of making private health records public also resonates with what Frank Pasquale writes about health insurance scores. Rather than letting her medical history add up to a numeric identity assigned by some data broker, Price works to regain a kind of control over her health records. In the process, she works against narratives of private illness and private risk, showing instead how perceptions of health have very public consequences. Medical patients bear the brunt of those consequences, her poetry suggests, not commercial insurance services.

This event should help us imagine interesting new angles for the course material. Price’s poetry could become an interesting point of entry for a final project about individual reputation in the era of run-away data. Attend the talk and blog about it for extra-credit—brownie points if you ask a question about digital technology!"

Katie L. Price interviewed at Speaking at Marvels

Katie L. Price is interviewed over at Speaking at Marvels around her second above/ground press title, Sickly (2015) [while referencing her first, BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015)]. See the full interview here.

Avant-Canada: On the Canadian avant-garde, eds. Betts + Price, Jacket2

above/ground press authors Gregory Betts and Katie L. Price have co-edited "Avant-Canada: On the Canadian avant-garde" over at Jacket2, featuring a series of essays that came out of the Avant Canada: Artists, Prophets, Revolutionaries conference that was held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, November 4–6, 2014.

Check out here to see their introduction, and links to the featured essays. The list of contributors to the feature includes essays by past and present above/ground press authors Stephen Collis, Alex Porco, Lori Emerson and Erín Moure, as well as Sarah Dowling, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kaie Kellough, Tyrus Miller, Heather Milne and Vanessa Place, with critical pieces on Jordan Abel, Christian Bök, Ron Silliman, Erin Wunker, Michael Nardone, Lillian Allan, Steve McCaffery, d'bi.young, Lee Maracle, Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri and Rachel Zolf.

some author activity: Greenstreet, Price, beaulieu + lopes,

Kate Greenstreet has some new work up at Delirious Hem; Katie L. Price is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; derek beaulieu is interview by Finn Harvor at his "Conversations in the Book Trade" blog; and damian lopes is part of a "how to get published" workshop in Barrie, Ontario, alongside Alana Wilcox and Bruce Meyer, on May 18, 2016.

Katie L. Price reads w/ Rob Fitterman, Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, April 13, 2016

above/ground press author Katie L. Price (author of the 2015 chapbooks BRCA: Birth of a Patient and Sickly, both still very much available) reads at Philadelphia's Kelly Writers House with Rob Fitterman.

"Whenever We Feel Like It"
Kelly Writers House
Arts Cafe
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 
April 13, 6:00pm

Free and open to the public. Bios for both authors, as well as further information on the event and Kelly Writers House, lives at: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0416.php

new from above/ground press: Sickly, by Katie L. Price

Sickly
Katie L. Price
$4

Dead Tissue / Living Ideas

            for Charles Bernstein

Think of dead tissue as deposited in language and writing, as the compost heap in which present language and writing grows. Suppose dead tissue as comprising an historical unconscious lived out as perception, as smell and taste, as speech. Imagine consciousness resounding with an inexhaustible repository of tissue, as a cave to be mined. And consider poetry as that mining, so the incorporation of dead tissue (call them prior texts) into a work is not simply collage or a familiar, almost comforting, defamiliarization technique, but the spiritual domain of poetry, its subject (subject-ness) percolating through.

            Tissue not dead then, though their origin is past. Or tissue dead only in the way a culture may die, be lost, its people vanish without records or monuments or memories. Tissue, then, not so much dead as submerged, melted, transubstantiated, absorbed; everywhere informing but no where fully explicable. Yet such tissue are neither solace, as a past to which we can turn, nor tools to represent the present. In this sense, dead tissue are not the stars but the heaven in which the stars gleam, not tools but tolls.

            This sense of “dead tissue” turns the phrase into an oxymoron; for tissue cannot die though we may seek to kill them. Kill them in rage that we are the mortal but they are not (“the body dies, the body’s beauty lives”). Or kill them in that perverse homage we call display: hod up, inspect, collect (as the father kills the moth for his son in Stein’s The Making of Americans: “caught him and killed him and pinned him”). Here is the root of what, ungraciously, I call tissue-ational mimesis: that tissue are static objects that can be accurately portrayed. The controlling impulse to “catch and pin” collects much more that the putative tissue; the desire to represent overwhelms the tissue represented. Thinking, which is the living idea of tissues, their flesh, consists no in representations of concepts but in a fabric or nexus of relations. Tissues are always syntactic and prosodic, constituted by the interaction of different kinds of elements—scenic, associational, historical, economic, tonal—and as such are never reducible to one type of image.

            So a second sense of “dead tissues”, suggesting a rule of always-already formulated concepts, habits of agreement running roughshod over newly formulating vistas. Call it a necroidiocracy, ideas stiffened by rigor mortis wounding flesh with their rigidity and tenchorationality: the arrogance of logic and the perniciousness of the “common sense” stereotype, each disguising its biases in the shadows of its neutrality.

            Language is the first technology, the extension of the body outward toward an articulation, forging, of the world, which is immediately transformed by this act, hence a forgery. As Stein so majestically shows in How to Write, tissues are to be enacted not entombed. Words, that is, do not signify tissues; rather, ideas are forged in the ovens of historical language practice, which means as visual representations and as sound.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October 2015
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Katie L. Price’s writing—critical, creative, and other—has appeared in such venues as Fence, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Canadian Literature, and Jacket2, and with such presses as No Press, above/ground press, and Manchester UP. She currently directs the Academics department at a college access and success nonprofit, serves as Interviews Editor for Jacket2, and co-directs the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium.

This is Price's second chapbook with above/ground press, after BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Lyndsay Kirkham reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Broken Pencil #68

Lyndsay Kirkham was good enough to review Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Broken Pencil #68. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Price’s chapbook, after Edric Mesmer reviewed such over in Yellow Field. And of course, copies of Price’s chapbook is still very much available. As she writes:

BRCA: Birth of a Patient is an experimental flexing of poetry’s potential, ultimately, asking the question: can anything stand as poetry? Opening with an x-rayed image of a tumored breast, this chapbook follows the medicalized progress of a young woman who has discovered a lump in her right breast.

            A variety of medical documents, charts and imaging stand in as the poetics of this narrative. Points of view switch from different oncology specialists; the reader is asked to conjure a redacted patient from a history – a history that is not of the patient, but of her diseased body. With an obvious nod to found poetry and the longer forms, Price’s work functions as an academic exercise that asks questions, prods at long-established institutions, and challenges the reader’s own notions about body, gender essentialism and the relationship between illness and the self.

            Price is clearly critical of how medical culture writes the body, particularly the diseased body. It is what the author has expunged from the medical files that stands out as the poetic muscle of BRCA. One line reads: “The above findings were discussed with        of _____________ and 2:05 p.m.” Readers can easily insert themselves into this fictionalized file and locate the anonymity experienced by the ordered process of documented disease.

            Unfortunately, the medical-chart format of Birth of a Patient leaves the reader hunting for trinkets of poetics in an eye-straining wall of medicalized discourse. With dense passages that offer little more than a 2-dimentsional report on a patient’s breast cancer, many of the pieces fail to illuminate the meaning that Price is so obviously shooting for.

            A deeper consideration of organization and the use of white space would lend itself to the author’s goal of critiquing how our culture writes the body. BRCA should be appreciated for the queries it makes about text, authorship and our relationship to bodies and verse.

Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10

Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10. Much thanks! And of course, copies are still very much available.

Katie L. Price

BRCA: Birth of a Patient

above/ground press

2015

Of ways inadequate to approach Katie L. Price’s chapbook, with cover image of chest x-ray of female torso, there are many. All found text, these roman numeraled sections guide a reader through stages in the construction of this patient; thereby, the reader is somewhere near witness—at a distance not necessarily safe; and from here the most poignant of arguments for reading as sexed are met. As conceptual poem, this comes perhaps closer than any to representing that x-rayed ribcage—if not heart itself—all too human if far from embrace. The reader is not here to make anything better. In Anne Boyer’s defiantly exploratory essay “The Sororal Death” she maps the separate continents of the personal “I” and the term “cancer.” Price’s approach offers a different way to, occurring in third person, with redacted names of patient and doctors. As goes the analysis that Sappho’s poems may not be about her but “Sappho” in highly ritualized telling, the author is able to stand without. This may [be] the gift of the conceptual poem. Untoward that vacuum the reader comes dangerously close—close to the Reason for Visit, the Family History, the Consent for and Risks of Chemotherapy…How inhabit the reading of such a line as: “24 y.o. […] woman with newly diagnosed ER+/ PR+/Her 2neu 3+ breast cancer undergoing neoadjuvant DD AC +TH”? It leaves out what Sontag called (as quoted by Boyer) “one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage…” Now the poem goes there.

new from above/ground press: BRCA: Birth of a Patient, by Katie L. Price

BRCA: Birth of a Patient
Katie L. Price
$4

Diagnosis

I. Diagnostic Report

The patient is a 23 year old female who presents with a palpable right breast mass. The patient states that she self palpated this mass last week. Patient states that she has no other medical problems

Real-time sonographic evaluation of the right breast was performed. The area of concern is located in the right breast at 10 o’clock one to 2 cm from the areolar margin. There is an irregular hypoechoic mass measuring 22 x 26 by 29 mm. The finding is highly suspicious for malignancy. In addition to the right axilla, there is a lymph node with effacement of the fatty hilum measuring 8 x 10 x 11 mm. A mammogram was deferred at this time as the patient missed her menstrual cycle last week and is not definitely certain of her pregnancy status. A mammogram is recommended at a later time once the pregnancy status is determined.

II. Impression

1. Irregular hypoechoic mass seen in the right breast at 10 o’clock. Biopsy is recommended. The mass is amenable to core needle biopsy or excisional biopsy. Both options were discussed with the patient. The patient desired to have a core needle biopsy and therefore she was scheduled for the procedure for later this week.

2. Abnormal appearing lymph node seen in the right axilla. Fine needle aspiration is recommended.

The above findings and recommendations were discussed with the patient. In addition, the result were discussed with                   of _____________ and 2:05 p.m.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2015
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Katie L. Price’s writing—critical, creative, and other—has appeared in such venues as Fence, the Journal of Medical Humanities, Canadian Literature, and Jacket2. Originally from Utah, she resides in Philadelphia and Toronto. She currently works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, serves as Interviews Editor for Jacket2, and co-directs the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium.

Produced, in part, as a handout at Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, April 18-19, 2015, from 11am-5pm at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Porter Hall, 453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY. Much thanks to Chris Fritton for his help and support. http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com