Noctuary Press

70 pgs./$14.00

 I enjoy moving into the space of a book with the feeling that I can trust what the writer has told me about it. Guess indicates that F  IN “began as a ghost story.” What is the difference between what something began as and what it becomes? And how will that becoming (which involves a “((ubiquitous) dead girl” (a becoming which can’t be controlled in the same way that indicating what a project’s beginning is can)) end up altering, terrorizing (“I’m going to have to hurt you”) or enabling me?

The figure on the cover of the book reaches one way but looks another. This is how a “heroine [with] agency and appetite” would have to proceed: moving many ways at once (“if I didn’t have a twin you wouldn’t be seeing her ghost”). I find myself wondering if a blackbird or a mother or a sister will emerge (“the dead come back; it’s just a matter of naming”) and bite this figure as she tries to finger her way to the gold locket, the hope for a golden egg.

What is the most honorable way for me to approach a self-named “erasure”? Knowing “compression is vital to [Guess’] aesthetic” is it honoring to simply enter the succinct yet spacious realm of these pages (some of which only have 5 words on a page) as one would an empty, deteriorating house? Is it an inverse-violation that my desire is to grab red crayon and draw shapes of liminal organs in the agoraphobic clenches of F  IN? Does intentionally filling an erasure rape its sparse confidence? I am sorry if it seems that I am obsessing over this; this is a real ethical dilemma for me. I am just not sure: am I really to “erase place” along with how this book began? Or is there something more I can add to its haunting noir?  Continue reading →