Atlassed
by Jane Unrue

Description

Jane Unrue’s Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of Paterson or Leaves of Grass—except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. “Brow and Chin Variations,” or “Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission”). These headings supply in large part the “unity” of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.” (Gunnar Benediktsson)