Newcomer Can’t Swim, Renee Gladman. Kelsey St. Press, 2007. Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim mixes poetry with prose to recreate life for the twenty-first century flaneur in urban America, where, amid a confusion of aims, identities, and miscommunication devices, being attuned to different frequencies …
In January 2008 I met Renee Gladman for the fist time when she flew to San Francisco from Brown University, where she teaches, to give a reading at my alma mater, the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC). Since my time there, the San Francisco campus has acquired an …
My history at Kelsey Street began in 2006 with the publication of Concordance, a collaboration between poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and visual artist Kiki Smith. Our artists don’t illustrate, any more than our writers caption images. These books are true collaborations, by which I mean a collective labor in which each …