 |
Juice by Renee Gladman Prose 2000 $11 ISBN: 0-932716-55-5
|
In her first full-length book, Juice, Renee Gladman:
dices and skewers the discourses through which our ideologies manifest—the ways we typically, with scant awareness, speak of history, culture, time—then she seasons with a diction that is incontrovertibly calm, and roasts her language in the flame of a syntax that is subversively direct. What we are served fills us with the emptiness of seeing through the gaps in our signifying systems, and into a subject's unknowability and otherness.
Rather than simply progressing forward in linear fashion, Gladman's narratives accrue such elliptic disruptions spatially, exposing a sequencing that is as close to three dimensional expansion as one might come in articulating a subject's perception of a situation. Pressing such limits allows Gladman to point almost simultaneously in many directions toward what arrives in the gaps between our language's ability to express what we perceive.
If certain words are spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of the cup of water turned towards the wall, whatever strength found in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strutting slightly. (Juice, 26, 27)
-- Rusty Morrison, Electric Poetry Review # 3, 2002.