Additional information
by Jill Magi (Author)
Comfortable neither with the self who is made entirely through autonomy or genealogy, SPEECH tracks the western-world idea of freedom, asking whether the person who believes they can say and write whatever they want is more free or less aware of the nature of free speech as a right everywhere. Formally, SPEECH invokes the action of walking and weaving: enjambed lines that accrue, building pages vertically through repetition of sound, syntax, and metrical patterning. In the book, a woman walks, threading her way through a cityscape that overlays west and east, here and there, past and present, self and other, creating a place and person neither and both.
Author Biography
Jill Magi works in text, image, and textile and her books include Threads, Torchwood, SLOT, Cadastral Map, LABOR, SIGN CLIMACTERIC, and a monograph on text-image entitled Pageviews/Innervisions (Rattapallax/Moving Furniture Press). Recent work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pheobe, and Rivulet. In October of 2017 Jill blogged for the Poetry Foundation, and in the spring of 2015 Jill wrote weekly commentaries for Jacket2 on "a textile poetics." Her essays have appeared in The Edinburgh University Press Critical Medical Humanities Reader, The Force of What's Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-garde, The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, and The Eco-Language Reader. Jill has been awarded residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace program, the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center, and has had solo shows with Tashkeel in Dubai and the Project Space Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi. For her community-based publishing work, Poets & Writers magazine named her as among the most inspiring writers in the world in 2010. Jill teaches in the literature/creative writing and visual arts programs at NYU Abu Dhabi where she joined the faculty in 2013.
