BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Aug-03 | ISBN: 1876857951 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 224pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

An information-age critique of information and process, this poetry trilogy treats such interrelated themes as identity and authority and strategies beyond Dadaist appropriation and postmodern ventriloquism. Catherine Daly’s constructed a reader’s playground by vatic, cathartic rapine of canonical texts including the “Amoretti” of Edmund Spenser, the Greek Anthology, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature; religious women’s dictation, testimony, and writing; wireless communication, slide shows, truth tables, and Boolean algebra; high culture sculpture and junk culture celebrities and plots. Included in the three sections of DaDaDa is hagiography of interior decorators and fashion designers, OuLiPonian manipulations of anonymous medieval prayers about the passion, a “woman’s epic” poem based on the writings of Marguerite Porete which erases, creative etymology, quotes from female country and western lyricists, and instructions for making a Palm Pilot vibrate, all ultimately examining truth, freedom, art, craft, and other ideas. Daly rewrites as reading, as performance, as decoding, recoding, and encoding. This post-language poetry is devoted to sound play and pleasure. It is religious poetry underpinned by fervid atheism, literary criticism as heresy, confessional verse biography, serious poetry riddled with cheap puns.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reading Fundamentals; In the Beginning; Last Words; From the Baltimore Catechism; Palm Anthology; Glow, Little Glow Worm; PDA / Commands; Pilot; Wetware; Land or Board; Magnetism; Handheld; LCD / Lucid / Lewd; Touch Screen; Electromagnetic Field; /x is a Switch /xx /xxx; Wireless Aerialists; Mistress Plot; Adorata; Oos; Oos; Ice; Ahs; Ease; Use; Heresy; Women’s Work; “now imagine great beauty writing on my heart”; Free Spirit; Commutare; Listen; (St.) Hildegard von Bingen’s Visions; False Apparitions; vates Prophet interpreter xiejiao nabi’ pqou‹sge ; Woman and Island; Solo, Alone; Grouse; Khansa (Tumadir bint ‘Amr); Begin the Beguine (We Suddenly Know What Heaven We’re In); In Medias Res; Blind Invocation; Blinds; Blinds (Another Version); Cover Right (Down); Cover Right (Up); Box Out; Shuffle Space; Strips ; Checkerboard Across; Checkerboard Down; Split (In); Split (Out); Marguerite Sings as Dissolve Words; Dissolve Letters, Bridging to Cover a Break in Time.; Random Bars Vertical, Bridging Cut. Break in Continuity.; Fade to Vowels and Pauses; Random Bars; Cut; Strips Right Down; Box In; Wipe ; Dissolve and Blur; Start Walking; Circularity; Transition; Legendary; The Curious, Pervious St. Catherine; Desert Paradise; Attributes ; Ladies; After the Lives of the Poets; from Lives of the Decorators; Upholstery; Silence; Dust Day and Night; It’s a Different Dreamtime; Desert Pieties; from Lives of the Designers; The Outsiders; Americans Rah Rah Rah; Palvinar; The Burlesques; About Portraits by Eleanor Antin

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“Cavernous and electric, DaDaDa unfolds as a hypnotically twisted love tome investigating the r/elation between language systems and the erotics of communication. Plotting the truncated lives of letters, as mistresses, matrices, vessels, vials, viols, vile induces, indices, Catherine Daly’s passionate tripartite tour de force rages with linguistic virtuosity as a “cross-stitched sampler” of contemporary culture, “hot sync simulacra,” literary heresies.” —Adeena Karasick

“Seldom is such a commodious pathway opened with a first book. It is, as its author says, “Huge toroid / experiments.” She’s right about that; look up “toroid.” Catherine Daly is the “epideictic girl” of her verse’s universe. Any book that places Georgia O’Keefe in the same neighborhood with Ann Corio has a thing or two to tell us about telling, about “deep regional feeling,” about aboutness.” —Aldon L. Nielsen

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Catherine Daly was valedictorian of her class at St. Teresa of Avila High School in a small blue collar city in the American Midwest. An Illinois Scholar at Trinity College and Merit Fellow at Columbia University, Daly has worked as a technical architect, officer in a Wall Street investment bank, engineer supporting the space shuttle orbiter, software developer for motion picture studios, and teacher. She lives in Los Angeles. She is also author of a book of poetry entitled Locket.