I am writing you from afar by Moyna Pam Dick

I am writing you from afar is the second book in Dick’s neographic (new/iterative, novel-/gospel-tinged, intercompositional, and cross-genre) Evasions Trilogy, which explores ardent yearning via minimalist abstraction, dense speculation, and minxy, vulnerable saints. Engaging with Feldman, Michaux, and Mohamedi, afar posits art as refusal and refuge, rebellion and rapture—a way out of narrative threat and an escape from obsessive/extravagant philosophizing. Dual imperatives of mark-making and emptiness-expanding charge the printed page qua score, shifting connections of sound and sense to create a plurilingual dissonance shot through with transcendent instants. This is a vagabond formalism, transfiguring St. Dympna’s patronage of runaways, incest survivors, and mental and neurological deviants into something metaphysical, erratically mystical, erotically transpositional—a polymorphous girlhood graphed toward, onto godfield.

Praise for I am writing you from afar

“To read Moyna Pam Dick’s I am writing you from afar is to wade into a roiling sea of language, its protean churn. Dick’s is a poetics of a restless and arresting ‘spiritual alchemy,’ of psychic, sonic, material transfiguration. But the steady heart of this provocative work beats with the force and the wild visionary intelligence of girlhood, its perils and its power. We are confronted with the tension of irreconcilable truths, the difficult knowledge that ‘what one wants to change is not changeable, what one wants to stay the same will not stand still.'”

—Genya Turovskaya, author of The Breathing Body of This Thought

“A stealth cosmos—ancient plenum, knocked about but beautifully fragmented—moves toward us from afar—not craving understanding so much as pleasure in its paradoxes, alluring ambiguities, puzzles, transformations: violets to violent, realism to transcendence. A crowd of artists, saints, mystics, martyrs, philosophers (as sui generis as their author) drive errant pronouns, egos, alters away from the autocratic ‘I.’ Spectral mamas, dicey papas (‘Father is God’s erection approaching you’) coexist with ‘a morsel of time and eternity, of desire, truth, the Trinity, a missing kingdom. Of darkness as gift and aim.’ All this occurs in textual space time geometries expansive enough for a ‘small brown bird as triangle’ to underscore this fact: there’s nothing else like MPD’s ecstatic compass.”

—Joan Retallack, author of BOSCH’D

“Scoring the paginated silences beneath words, Moyna Pam Dick writes us from an intimate distance, enacting transubstantiatory rites of language amid a retinue of musical and mystical interlocutors—acephalous saints, aleatoric scribes, sadistic dramaturges, and sundry corruptible others. More than a post-novelistic skewering of the family romance, this creaturely écriture issues a series of major philosophical theses on the vicissitudes of gender, and the void that our familiar symbols can’t help but dissemble. I am writing you from afar is an intervenient, clairvoyant text, through which written experience appears as one vast constellation.”

—Cam Scott, author of ROMANS/SNOWMARE

Moyna Pam Dick (aka Lou/Moina/Gregoire Pam Dick et al.) is the author of Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart (OPR, 2019), this is the fugitive (Essay Press, 2016), Metaphysical Licks (Book*hug, 2014) + Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009). Her novel graphic I am writing you from afar (BSL, 2021) belongs, with Edges, to the in-progress Evasions Trilogy—a triad that links spare art, fic spec + pert, abstractive saints. Also an artist + philosopher, Dick lives in New York City, where she explores transient structures (veridical, temporal, sonic, spatial, etc.), obsessive formalisms, haunted intertexts, cluster semantics + the vulnerable, moody, tender urban sublime. Her slyly unruly, tone-shifting notations span the genre-/gender-spectral.

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