Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness

by Spuyten Duyvil Press is available here and on Amazon:

http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/dear-marshall.html

Dear Marshall is a collection of experimental prose alternating between present and past, lyric and the epistolary. It examines language as wilderness, collapsing the human-made from the wild. The perspective oscillates: sometimes fragmented, clipped and splitting the space and the transparencies in between. It is a series of memoir/anti-memoir snapshots. There is also a sense of disguise and “faking it” as well as bifurcation of the self. 

“Heather Sweeney’s Dear Marshall, Language Is Our Only Wilderness, is a prose weave of declaration, story, romance, LA repository of a wild child  who is also a “swan on a diving board” with, echoes of the  Welsh Cad Goddeu (“I was a string on a harp.”)  with its assertive declarative sentences, simple but pithy, that weave a relational intimacy.   “I am a heightened rumor”. “Today I am a wave of rust” . I am an unspoken angle”. Who is Marshall? A device, a fellow traveler, a  “gentleman”, a lover,  the narrative suggests,  a happy construct to play against. This is a charming book which teases and feels current, like a life in language you could be living in 2020.”  --Anne Waldman 

Click here to read a review of the book on Periodicities.

Click here to read a review of the book on Entropy.

Photo Credit:  Ian Costello