Books

This is Called Moving:
A Critical Poetics of Film
(University of Alabama Press, 2005)



"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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Read more about the book.
Read the introduction by Tom Gunning.



Artificial Memory
(Belladonna Press, 2001)

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
(Roof Books, 1996)



"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

Mob
(O Books, 1994)



"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
(Potes & Poets, 1989)



"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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Read an excerpt from Motive for Mayhem.


From Solids
(Roof Books, 1983)



"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