• Stretched Warp
• by Maria Damon and Alan Sondheim
• $20.00 (includes shipping)

Wow, Alan Sondheim’s fierce affability and dedication to volatile energies of the abject collides with the lush foliage of Maria Damon’s capacious punk insouciance and anthropological knowhow. It’s a tour-de-force heteroglossic collaboration where each author’s voicings alternately mimic the other’s premises or stylistic riffs, handing muse and writer roles back and forth, starting to build a world together, then suddenly precipitate out into odd, often explosively funny, chunks that could only have been written by one consciousness or the other. In this symposium we watch the premises of each poem being negotiated as we read, maximalist text experiments gyrating and unfolding in forms willing to alternatively rhapsodize or goof around, not bound by professional formality. Damon and Sondheim achieve a pastiche of conjuring up things that sound like erudite allusions but are often made up—Gladiolus, Laurie Anderson Fenimore Cooper, dokes. This book is a total pleasure!
—Trace Peterson

Between the name and the numena, the loom and the lumena, fear, exuberance, whimsy and paranoia, Maria Damon and Alan Sondheim’s translingually semerotic collaboration erupts as an intertextasis of sonic and material space; an interstitchal space of fleshy threads woven through warped weaves, wounds, windows, glowing moats and fleshy hums. Deliciously luxuriating in a diasporic poetics, Stretched Warp unspools through mythologies, etymologies, translations, elations in an “auricular” colossus, a flooding “x-tacy” of a pliant, re-pliant, prescient and ever-prismatic present.
—Adeena Karasick

“Cross-stitcher” Maria Damon and “sound-stitcher” Alan Sondheim take their reader on a wild swerve, stitching together language that is diasporic and despairing, but with a deep counter-swerve that buoys the reader in these corona-virus times. Stretched Warped swerves and then swerves back again, leaving the reader hanging on to every beautifully parsed and infinitely expanding word. This is a magnificent piece of writing.
—Leslie Morris

Stretched Warp attends to the material conditions of making words, shuttling and teasing, through pattern and slippage, signal and noise, the very edges of ourselves. Meaning ravels and unravels, swerves and swoons, erotically, mythically, exuberantly. This “singing word-horde” carves out a strictly impossible space between digital and (digits are fingers!) analogue. There’s system and slapstick and gravity and pure unadulterated pleasure. It’s a great time!
—Emanuela Bianchi