minor chord
by Joan Fiset

Description

New and open work in poetry by Joan Fiset accompanied by quilt-like collages by Liz Gamberg.  As one reviewer stated, it is a book that presents and evokes textures as a means of exploring nature and the self.  As one poem says, “we revise toward green” — altogether a refreshing and inspiring read.

Comments:

“In Minor Chord, Joan Fiset’s poems and Liz Gamberg’s collages explore the slippage of time, the fracturing of nature, the slow, unavoidable diminishment of self. But don’t let the title fool you. Yes, there’s a melancholy here, but also a joy and playfulness in the construction and the conversation. A truly evocative and unforgettable work.” (Hasanthika Sirisena, author of Dark Tourist)

“Minor Chord is a book, if not about textures, then one that makes and thinks through them. Pairing poems with visual collages, Fiset juxtaposes linguistic patterns with tactile ones, forging disjunctures between and within individual pieces. “[W]e meet in the center / this disconnect,” she writes, which is how so many of these poems feel: made whole through incessant collision. Such junctures are sensory, but they are also spatial and temporal, considering the frayed nature of galaxies and the “time waves of dark matter” alongside objects as mundane and seemingly innocuous as a pair of “mittens & scarf / bundled against the cold.” In these contemplations of ostensibly minor – but, as it turns out, actually major – significance, Fiset reveals the totality inherent in all small things and simultaneously, but not paradoxically, the truly myriad particularities that comprise even the grandest of things.” (John James, author of The Milk Hours)

“A curious sort of weather spreads across this book, and we are gifted downpours of surprising image–both actual and textual–and striking observation.  ‘we revise toward green’ writes Joan Fiset, and there is little doubt she does. This book is verdant with unanticipated turns of phrase and natural observations.” (Kyle McCord, author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult)