New Book!
ANNOUNCING…..
cris cheek
part: short life housing
This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK-born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s — the so-called “linguistically-innovative poetry” grouping later anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke’s Floating Capital: New Poets from London. Likewise, he became central to developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a prolific, genre-slipping figure: poet, performance artist and musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which part: short life housing goes far to rectify.
At the heart of this book are two long sequences, previously unpublished aside from short extracts: “canning town chronicles,” a scathing set of verbal accretions that emerged from the wreckage of the Thatcher era; and “f o g s,” a series of typestracts quarried from verbal improvisations recorded during outdoor walks in densely foggy weather. Also included are several shorter pieces, including a selection of early 1980s work and “plain speaking yet,” cheek’s memorial to the novelist Kathy Acker. The poems have, in keeping with the author’s concern for the specificity of occasion and publication, been revised and visually reimagined with this volume in mind.
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For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.
— Carla Harryman
Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume.
– Caroline Bergvall
“i s y o u r t o n g u e a g l o m / w e a p o n t h a t s t a i n s ?” cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space. After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often actually is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the public sphere, “w h e r e o t h e r s f e a r t o / t / r e a d.”
— Peter Manson
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cris cheek, part: short life housing. The Gig, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9735875-5-5. 270pp, 6″ x 9″, perfectbound.
ORDERING INFORMATION (with a special deal!)
Within Canada: $22.50 — Within the US: $22.50 US
UK: £17 — Euro: €22
All prices include postage.
A special deal: for $8 Cdn / $8 US / £5 / €7, add one of the following:
- Slant, the canning town chronicles, sound&language (CD with cheek, Sianed Jones, Phillip Jeck — music based around texts collected in part: short life housing, as well as a reading of a Kinks tune…!)
- cris cheek, the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents)
- Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada
- Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles
- Allen Fisher, Entanglement
Please make out cheques to “Nate Dorward”, & send to:
109 Hounslow Ave, North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
(email: ndorward [at-sign] ndorward [dot] com)