Description
Poems by Adeena Karasick
Visualization by Warren Lehrer
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings
Touching in the Wake of the Virus
96 Pages / Poetry
(3-piece Hardcover, paper over boards, 3-color foil stamp, one color interior, offset printed on acid-free paper, smyth sewn: $28.95)
ISBN 978-1-956921-13-7, October 5, 2023, Pre-sales available April 15.
Inscribing what Levinas might call “espace vital” (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. Written by Adeena Karasick and visualized by master book artist/vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer, the two poems track the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. They explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word opening, laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. The poems foreground language as an organism of hope—highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
This exquisitely produced book is the first collaboration between poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and pioneer designer/author and vis lit practitioner Warren Lehrer. The poems, written by Karasick, speak-sing to re-entering the world after a long period in quarantine. Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page and through the pages of this volume. His typographic compositions give form to the interior, emotional, metaphorical, historical and performative underpinnings of the poems. Together, the writing and visuals create a new whole that engages the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the poems. The book is augmented by a soundtrack recording of both poems performed by Karasick with music by Grammy-award winning composer/musician Frank London.
Praise for Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings
“An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page… In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust deconstruction upon the world, unraveling beliefs and allowing people to see the world with new eyes. Karasick’s poems and Lehrer’s images of textual choreography deal with what emerging from a long, isolating quarantine feels like ‘in the today of wild touching; / the today of withholding, the today of / passionate rations.’ …Karasick often uses alliteration and sonic association to represent this slow re-entry—the kinetic chaos of relearning one another. Lehrer makes a performance out of form… forcing the eye to sweep across unpredictable, textured pages when Karasick’s speakers lament their physical alienation… This collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, a vivid new graphic-text collaboration by poet-theorist Adeena Karasick and writer-designer Warren Lehrer, has the subtitle, “Touching in the Wake of the Virus,” marking our distance from lockdown. Return and reawakening register in subtle observations… We are back in the world, sort-of, through milestones and marked moments in which the concept of “open” carries a variety of meanings… Polyglot resonances reflect the global reach of the virus… air bubbles and exclamations effervesce… erotic play and sexual associations culminate in the corona virus floating through and across the space. Vectors of force and torque instantiate a text full of edges and conflicts, interruptions and disruptions, careening towards its final statement… Nothing in this collaborative project feels like a wrong note or mistake. Distinctly shaped, strikingly formed, read as—not through its—graphical language, Ouvert Oeuvre is a vivid book, vibrant and attractive, and handled with suppleness.”
Johanna Drucker, JD: ABCs Newsletter, Substack
“A striking publication that gives voice (and form) to the challenges, triumphs, interactions and realizations of our post-pandemic world. In this engaging hardback, writer, designer and book artist Warren Lehrer has visually staged powerful lines by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick. Raw emotions and meaning jump off the page in stirring alliterations, capturing observations made throughout the years of lockdowns… The chaos, pain, hope and connections (or absence of) experienced during the pandemic are inescapable in these playful visualisations…. The publication comes to a close with a QR code that links to another collaboration—this time with Grammy-award winning composer and musician Frank London—of powerful recordings, delivered with such fervour by Karasick… Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings demonstrates the crafting of a sensory experience and will interest anyone with an appetite for linguistic and typographic experimentation…”
Amy Henry Eye Magazine
“[Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings] is like nothing I’ve seen in recent memory… I wonder why most books don’t look like your book? Why is it such a dark horse? Because what you’re doing is not ‘experimental.’ It’s 21st-century realism… It’s not just that this is a pandemic book. People don’t seem to realize the world in front of them. Because they go about their whole day, they’re texting with their friends, they’re looking at YouTube videos, and then, when they sit down to write, they might as well be sitting there with a quill and a candle. Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a 21st-century book. It’s how information flows… A joyful meditation connection to our post-everything world… Laid out in a perfect expression of what the language is doing… gritty… beautiful!”
Bill Lessard Heavy Feather Review (interview with Karasick & Lehrer)
“A total work of art, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings combines poetry, typographic design, and music as a single unit… The soundtrack of Karasick’s reading of the poems to sound design by composer/performer Frank London allows one to read/view Lehrer’s typography along with the aural presentation. The two poems—“Openings” and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus”—express a re-awakening of body and mind after two years of seclusion. The poems demand a performance and exuberance that matches their look, their puns, alliterations, allusions, and sheer sonority of enunciation… It is a reward for those who have survived and endured—so open the book, touch its surfaces, and enjoy.”
Tom Bowden Book Beat, I Arrogantly Recommend column
“The Covid virus and ensuing chaos is now a touchstone of early 21st-century artistic expression, especially poetry, not the least of which is the dramatic Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings. The poems by Adeena Karasick, a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist, media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics, have been interpreted and typographically visualized by Warren Lehrer, a pioneer of the typographic narrative and poetry movement. Delicately designed and smartly produced—in a smyth-sewn, three-color foil-stamped three-piece hardcover binding—Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is a swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and type… and will appeal to anyone trying to find humanity in the wake of pandemics.”
Steven Heller Print Magazine
“Innovative Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings Book Explores Post-Pandemic World… This is the first collaborative book between poet, performer and cultural theorist Karasick and designer/author/vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer who has a track record of producing work which melds books, typography, animation, and performance… The book comes with a soundtrack recording of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.”
Fine Books and Collections
“An artistic collaboration that evokes—through poetry and design—the reopening of the world after Covid-19 shut it down… What captures the imagination in both these poems is the gray areas between opening, but not fully, and touching, but not all the way, and not with confidence… In this book, which comes with an audio soundtrack, the oral and the visual and the printed word all come together.”
NY Public Radio
“A true masterpiece of linguistic play and exploration! Karasick and Lehrer have created an exceptional work that deserves recognition for its innovative approach to language, masterful use of visual and literary techniques, and its contribution to the ongoing conversation about language, media, and culture.”
Paolo Granata, Professor, Book and Media Studies, University of Toronto
“Recommended for all poetry lovers… In Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, words capture the complexity and richness of touch, with its ability to connect us to others, to leave a lasting impression, and bring pleasure and joy… from a reader’s mind and a wardrobe, to the sea and a microphone… Transformative and deeply rewarding.”
Ruchi Agarwal Pegasus Literary
“This book asks the reader to engage in such original and challenging ways. It’s an absolutely gorgeous reading experience on the page. Then through a QR code in back, you get to experience and read along with the recording of Adeena’s beautiful, trance-like performance. Spectacular!”
Karen Karbiener Director, Walt Whitman Initiative
“Like slowed-down Joyce, with less inscrutable puns but equally high-powered formulas and searing insights, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings deserves our utmost attention. A deftly wrought and groundbreakingly crucial volume.”
Derrick de Kerckhove, author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence
Punning with conceptual condensations until pleasures become fireworks, joyously singing the language dynamic, displaying heartfelt learning, sexy switch-ups and flights of insight, this work is a gasp-worthy balance of poetic eros, theoretical intelligence, and luminous suspicion. An all-round original book, here the sacred, the playful, the Kabbalah and the female are flying high in polymorphous boldness. A hell of a book. Karasick blasts on all her cylinders!
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet-critic
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