Abigail Child

Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry

Mouth to Mouth (a “lurid lyric machine”) overflows with wit and lusciousness. “Spangled/ massy/ primped/ saturated” and drunk with alliteration, these athletic poems both resuscitate and kiss language, “loosening what is sfumato/ and indocile.” “Flamboyant and immense,” they loll about and caper in “a/dull or/ mobile sparkling/verveine sky” — a dazzling field of love in verse and verse in love with its own copious potentialities. "

—Nada Gordon

Abigail trades in opposites and identities, formulations in crisis down to up, left to right. The direct and the elliptical shove each other out of the way berserk with élan and éclat impetuous but you can jump around. You can’t help it.

…loving the uncertainty of knowing everything and all of it false. This is a disaster or I mean is it?

No, it’s units—materials—segments

—Steve Benson

This dark echo remix is “Advertising nothing,” instructing you to “wear what you download” while unveiling the “veined permeable ecstatic suck.” Child invents a ripeness to seduce your decodings.

—Ariel Goldberg

Reviews:

Review of Mouth to Mouth by Charles Borkhuis, in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Oct/Nov 2017 Issue #252 (Page 29)

“29th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Announced”, Lambda Literary, June 13, 2017

Published in both French and English by MetisPresses as part of their PLANSécant collection, the book focuses on (and takes its title from) Child's signature series of films, IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, bringing together five essays examining different aspects of the BORN FOR series, an interview with Abigail Child, and transcriptions of her texts/poems, which form the soundtracks of the BORN FOR films.

—ed. François Bovier with critical essays by Tom Gunning, Melissa Ragona, Redell Olsen, and Thomas Zummer.

"An excellent and distinctive addition to the MCP series. . .This book focuses a highly articulate poetic intelligence on a range of topics relevant to film studies and literary writing, and at the same time presents a portfolio of interviews and discussion and script material that charts the trajectory of a significant contemporary experimental filmmaker."

—Bruce Andrews, author of Paradise and Method: Poetry and Praxis

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A two volume chapbook containing nine parts of a long poem: a portrait of Russia after the break-up of the USSR. “This phenomenon consisted of a hallucination. Try to break yourself against a sphere. I remember at the beginning of our acquaintance a passage feints. There is more than one direction. At the beginning of our acquaintance a kind of delight which pluralizes meaning by gesture and without conjunction. Hero chandelier. What began as a heroic search for a historical shortcut is truncated. Nation made to walk on its hands. Nation feints. Two raisin cakes and tea set out, tea and crackers, tea and bread, tea and jam, real cigarettes. Resources of repetition, variation and control. We memorize your staying and send you our ideal.”

—from Artificial Memory.

"Scatter Matrix unfolds like a map, grid tracing multiple possibilites of language and form. Here is a scale, and a sense of time, where the score offers discrete signatures: 3 and 4 line measures upon which words balance or pivot forward. The result is a cumulation, a sense of connection along the diagonal, spins and collisions, slow fades and vaporous dissolves. Abigail Child's work invites productive inquiry and rewards readerly attention, to (the means of) the production of meaning, a late 20th century witness."

—Erica Hunt

""The trajectory of Abigail Child’s book Mob is as vast and populated as the Weegee photo on the cover, "Coney Island, 28th of July, 1940, 4’clock in the afternoon," filled with bathers staring into the sun/camera/East expectantly. Sexy, violent, driving, Mob exists persistently in an exploding landscape. Not afraid of saying so, Child insists upon offering a social and political critique in which she even shows glimpses of herself being duped."

—Jocelyn Saidenberg

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"A Motive for Mayhem is an extravaganza of jumps & starts & angles "resonant [with] voluptuous suggestions." Filmmaker & poet Abigail Child's cutting within and between sentences is energizing & startling, giving a pulsing, syncopated flow to these exploded lyrics and imploded proses."

—Charles Bernstein

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Published in the second season of issues from Coincidence Press (Oakland, California) during the winter of 1986, Climate/Plus was set in Van Dijk by David L. Sheidlower and printed on Ultima text-weight, saddle stitched between press-printed mauve covers with translucent endpapers and a still from one of Child's films tipped in to the interior front cover. 19cm trim. Edition of 330.

"You go up. A butte counter zap on the while while turning turn shock until in and do want procedure. Ideas repeat distinctly at it is P tional. Immerce the degreee. Even one timel disconnect they U who were who does struck very much very much doubly. Voodoo don't do it. Pockets on OK. Item fell says buys. The with cld cold. The are came met. And girl so they month for look in study mountain parts to after P t t, her pasl, her hours, first zebra repeat and a soft flesh foreground shock itself."

—from From Solids