Hourglass Transcripts

Hourglass Transcripts asks, What is the legible? How can the uncountable find the page outside of measurable time? To approach the preverbal, the unspeakable, it may be necessary to make an incision through the center of a line, to hyphenate, replace thought. Or, in "Hollowed out Book," the names of shipping lines float across the water like gigantic book titles, telling much about the distant and the up close. And so about the act of seeing. Form is motion through place--toward the not yet imagined: its fabulous possibility and the full extent of its previous demolition.

Susan Gevirtz's books include Spelt (with Myung Mi Kim, a+bend press), Black Box Cutaway (Kelsey St. Press), Taken Place (Reality Street), Linen Minus (Avenue B), and a critical book, Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). In Spring, 2000, she received the New Langton Arts "Bay Area Award in Literature."

"...Gevirtz...knows how to conjure the vibrant inner life of words and phrases by revealing their homophonic hailing frequencies ("many entrances/many embraces entrance us") and unpredictable contextual tensions ("Space is a frame up / we fill ourselves / in").... An heir to the Objectivist legacies of George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, Gevirtz lets us take no thing for granted."

– Fred Muratori, BOSTON REVIEW (Summer 2002)