"Figures for a Darkroom Voice enacts the transformations that occur in the objects that exist in our world. For Gordon and Wilkinson, this change normally follows an eroding path—a stripping away either to the essential or to the garbage. In this way, their voice comes across not as a warning, but as an ominous knell."
—Jesse Peterson , Interim
In Figures for a Darkroom Voice the rhetorical twisting of Noah Eli Gordon s abstractions meld with the ominous narratives of Joshua Marie Wilkinson s fragments, turning Wallace Steven s notion of a supreme fiction toward a supreme friction, one where the work of these two poets is fused into a voice as singular as it is sinister. Imagine a gallery in which Cornell boxes talk back, a Maya Deren film in which the audience dissolves into projector light, a Philip Glass composition played exclusively on medieval weaponry, such are the compelling results of this collaborative work.
In prose poems, syntactically elusive sonnets, and haunting, haiku-like fragments illuminated by the ink drawings of Noah Saterstrom, one encounters a recurring cast of logically-skewed images, inauspicious yet arresting aphorisms, and characters rendered fully bizarre in the lightest of brushstrokes. Here, the slippage and disruptions of textually investigative work collides with the mind-expanding project of conjuring paradox, while never quite leaving linearity behind. When these poets write, I am trying to draw you a simple picture of explanation, one realizes the monumental nature of such a task. And this task is made more complex, and ultimately more rewarding, by the inclusion of Noah Saterstrom s dynamic images. Who, Gordon and Wilkinson ask, operates the levers in this darkroom dress-shop? Who, indeed! The rich history of literary collaboration just got richer.
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007; selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series), A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Inbox (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, 2004), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003), as well as numerous chapbooks, including That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005; in collaboration with Sara Veglahn).
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press). He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University. His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is due out next year.
Noah Saterstrom has exhibited paintings, drawings, projects, and installations nationally and internationally. The recipient of grants and residencies, he also does numerous collaborations with writers and musicians. Recent publications include The Denver Quarterly and Tarpaulin Sky. With Selah Saterstrom he curates Slab Projects, a series of ongoing investigations which generate public works in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast region.
