ISBN 978-1935084-68-6
\n 120 pages: $16.00
\nSpecial memorial price: $5.00
\nSeptember, 2014<\/p>\n
Engagements with the\u00a0Thousand and One Nights<\/strong><\/em>, gender, narration, and Sir Richard Burton, as well as other writers\u2019 takes on the story-cycle, Nights Reading muses upon the nature of narrative and Scheherazade as narrator. Drawing from the original story cycle’s positing of Scheherazade as redeemer of not only herself and her sister virgins of the kingdom, but of just rule and King Shariyar\u2019s humanity, the poems explore tropes of gender and of the seemingly powerless (women, slaves, blacks) to erode and challenge the status quo.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Marthe Reed\u2019s advice to Burton, the Nights translator, is to speak not of what concerns you not. Here the poet examines a great oral tradition put to paper, its \u2018thousand miles of moonlight\u2019 obscured by \u2018the catholicism of (his) intentions emending her account,\u2019 or rather, not so much Scheherazade\u2019s\u2014herself a fiction, but centuries of storytelling born of another world entirely. Marthe Reed\u2019s exploratory\u00a0Nights Reading<\/em><\/b>\u00a0writes its way through and around a story that may or may not be familiar, the sights, sounds and contradictions of the act of storytelling itself. Moving her book-length accumulations of lyric fragments through the \u2018serious play\u2019 of gymnastic puns, breath-breaks and incompletions, Reed\u2019s quick turns and shifts are deliberate, jagged and entirely unexpected. How does one remain on solid ground when both story and narrator are slippery, unreliable? Very carefully, one might say. \u2026a major coming forth\u2026 Marthe Reed
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\n \u2014Rikki Ducornet<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n \u2014rob mclennan<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n \u2014Jerome Rothenberg<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n 9781935084686
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