ONLINE Reviews

I, Afterlife

Reviewed by David Berridge (Intercapillary Space)

Perturbation, My Sister.

Reviewed by Eric Lorberer (Rain Taxi)

Scratch Sides

Reviewed by Steve Halle, Jacket # 32

Reviewed by Stephen Ellis, Big Bridge #9

Reviewed by Harry Thorne, How2, Spring 2004

Blog nods

Thanks to everyone who has read my book

And took the time to blog about it. Here are a few nods:

From Ron Silliman's Blog

Close read of Lead, Glass and Poppy

From Jack Kimball's
Pantaloons: Tykes on Poetry

Kristin Prevallet is on a mission. Several missions. Scratch Sides, subtitled "Poetry, Documentation, and Image-Text Projects," collects a pile of found items and reworks them into sincere falsehood. The first two sections of projects run on juxtaposed sentences or sentence fragments lifted from newspapers, e-mail, web searches, and the like. Middle sections document Prevallet's interest in fantasy narrative to accompany random-focus snapshots, for example, in "The Catalogue of Lost Glimpses," a "faux-ethnographic text," as Prevallet self-knowingly describes it in her ample end notes. Closing sections of Scratch Sides are the best reads, perhaps because they are in part tributes to other writers, borrowing inspiration from Robert Creeley, Dodie Bellamy and Brenda Coultas, among others. The visuals throughout have a catch-as catch-can feel -- hand-drawn loops on graph paper, sidewalk video stills, web-based passport shots downloaded and reprinted as-is. In the "Key Food" project, however, Prevallet messes with lurid fonts, rewriting supermarket coupons in fat, sloppy letters. A tomato sauce offer reads, "Crash & Burn Playdough F#!k Lego." Prevallet's principal aim is to amuse, but some of the juxtaposed texts go on too earnestly or too long without a sustained ironic pitch. In "Synthesis B" she lists 17 items from "A Glossary of Terms" for shopping The Gap online and defines them by resourcing a UFO piece from Fortean Times. Funny idea, mixed results. Pleat is defined as "an infant-like state generally pressed flat"; tint is "black helicopters and stealth aircraft, usually pale or delicate." In "After It" Prevallet shows her gift for unearnest mimicry, sending up Creeley's bent for taut, sweeping observation:

Lost in an embryonic lull

where color and speech

are the string around

a finger forgetful

of emergence as such.

That "as such" replicates Creeley's off-handedness, but it is also genuine stooping to a level of insincerity and dumbness that Prevallet could gamble more with, were she unearnestly to let go.

posted by Jack, June 24, 2004 10:15 AM

From Jordan Davis'
Equanimity

Looked at Kristin Prevallet's Scratch Sides last night (stymied by McGuckian again). I still love Key Food best of her sequences -- photoshopped grocery store circulars with running Spicerian commentary underneath. Liked the Three Poems section too; sounded to me like Bernadette's Lenox period taken as far as possible along the bad-ass end of the spectrum. Geoff Young once commented to me that it's so difficult to know with new writers who's got the goods; I took it at the time as a loaded coded remark meaning "NO UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS", but now that I'm not that new a writer anymore I match it up with something Anselm related, that his mother said (back in 97?) that in ten years, at least half the people going gung ho now will have stopped writing. I don't see Kristin stopping. She'll be saying (writing) whatever the hell comes into her head for the duration and it will always turn out to be there for an interesting reason. Is that having the goods? Didn't bring it to work (no computer at home, and by the way I'm going to have to knock off the blogging during the day, sigh, see how long that resolution stands) so I can't quote. I am less clear what she's doing when she plays earnest or Splicer. But when she's fun she's closer to punk than I knew I could handle.

Tuesday Jan. 21, 2003