Valentine to "Lilith"
( A Novel in Fragments : Jennifer K. Dick, corrupt press)
By page 10, I think : This mind runs thrills through the neuromaze – thoughtswords escape from too-thrashing body-wrenches : soma-hurts ≈ textweb…… then I read on page 25, « …her barrage of items catalogued as sensations : inked ».
Reading Lilith is absorbing it. It’s like keeping in a bowl (‘of silkworm larvae ‘) all the bits of texted lifechunks. They will come back in a later re-configured guise. Shake them, stir them, zing them centripetally in your ears. Jennifer K. Dick ravishes the language’s syntax, splatters and slices it. Dissects. The violence projects somato-psychic remnants that are reassembled seemingly on the fly but deliberately reposited at precise loci. L (Jen) elucidates then melds, welds the whole piece together. Re-collects it.
Lilith’s progress is a daydream meander through life’s nerve-shot stains toward finding a sense of self.
Pg. 38 : ‘Train holler plain dusting alcove uncovered’ / ‘Being lost is simply part of the expected’ For the reader too. Getting lost is required before getting one’s readerself found. Just go with it. To re-find your way, skip upstream then plunge back in the current. And muse. Be sure to muse.
There are deft sleights per Jazz & Bernstein : culling apt riffs and setting them anew, to the re-rendering tune of time-lapsing Lilith. Yet what this reviewer gloms onto most is the poet’s success at describing the neurosensate process in poetic real-time - sometimes mimicking a daydreaming drugged state wavering between input and output, stimulus and reaction, externally imposed events and internally charged emotions ≈ voiced, unvoiced, bursting in silence. Dick effectively brings together her medical and scientific delvings to smudge over the classic mind/body duality.
Lilith’s fragmented narrative interrupts the habit of too-fluent flow : variable layout, visual agility, spaced word-triplets stop the reader from succumbing to onrushing verve : as in all life/growth/change, the work stutters, feeds back, retro-capts, half-flounders and re-manifests anew.
It’s like wading around in a neuroshower of word-feels and feeling one’s wobbly way to a sensual, salutary textbath.
George Vance: long-time resident of Paris, with passages in Brussels, Nouméa, Reims, and presently in Guadeloupe; hybrid poet, mixed media; has read at various Paris venues (UAD, Poets Live, Ivy, Quadriphonics, Spoken Word); his work has appeared in UAD, Bastille, Pharos. Poetry volumes A SHORT CIRCUIT and Xmas collage published with corrupt press. Currently working on text-transformation project based on Infinite Jest. Scribbles daily.