Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A Mad Libs–style project contends with poetry from Turtle Island and Palestinian writers and asks: How can you claim space for claiming these [spaces]?
Sourcing from the works of more than twenty Palestinian and Indigenous poets, [SPACE]: Lessons in Taking and Making brings to light the relationship between reader and writer, person and space. By working through the poems and removing words, first person(s) and place(s), and finally linguistic subjectives such as language, Perry Cox uses the extracted words to create a word list, prompting the reader to fill in the blanks. The process presents theory-through-practice: collaborative and participatory composition methods that rely on intimate forms of engaging with Palestinian and Indigenous poetry writing and storytelling as qualitative research methods themselves.
Do you want to participate? Who and what are you accountable to? Should this be participatory work? At once playful and nostalgic, [SPACE]: Lessons in Taking and Making asks readers to consider their role in colonialism through their own instances of extraction and displacement.
'Poet Alexei Perry Cox's [SPACE]: Lessons in Taking and Making is a [serious] [playful] [necessary] reclamation of the very concept of space. If, in postcolonial theory, space has a history in Cartesian abstraction, part of the structure of colonial seizure of whole geographies, [SPACE] is nothing short of a reclamation of the concept of space. It takes up [SPACE], offering the possibility of reclaiming not only space, but time as well. A [poetry] [breathing] book that is equal parts game and anthology, in the tradition of conceptual poetry (hello Yoko Ono! hello Fluxus! hello surrealists!), this [soul] work invites us on a journey of [nightmare] migrations and [dreamed] returns, to unerase crucial diaspora and native texts, to restore names to [stolen] geographies, ourselves to our bodies, spirit to our breathing.' – Philip Metres, author of Dispatches from the Land of Erasure
‘A little soil is needed for life to take root. And, in the most desperate situations, it is not necessarily the most powerful who will save humanity and life itself, on the contrary. The legend of Turtle Island reminds us of this, especially in these murderous times when the great Predators and Alpha males who rule the world are working to destroy, for their own profit, all solidarity and compassion. In her own way, Alexei Perry Cox takes up this legend. In her latest collection, [SPACE], wonderfully intelligent and creative, she invites us to join her in the endeavour to expand our imagination so a great wind will to raise that will transform – as in the legend – the humus collected at the bottom of the oceans (our inner space) into an habitable, breathable place to live. A poet who believes in the power of language, Perry Cox invites her readers to become Reader-Writers by reclaiming, as she does, language – starting with those ghost words, erased by the desire of some for total eradication. Palestine, Gaza, Al Quds, Hebron … also, and for so long, Dakotas, Wounded Knee … even love, child … all equally despised, sullied, torn to pieces. In short, inspired texts, she reintegrates them without forgetting the ones – such as oxygen, breath, wind, dreams, beauty – that make this restoration’s work possible while offering us, at the same time, a concrete way to be part of this so urgent, collective project.’ – Olivia Elias, author of Your Name, Palestine, Chaos, Crossing, and This Mount Overlooking the Sea
'I haven't had such a delightful time with a book in many years. Alexei Perry Cox has put together a magnificent interactive experience that doesn't merely articulate creativity and compassion, but also demands creativity and compassion from the reader. [SPACE] beautifully illustrates how language is simultaneously infinite and specific, a means to constantly revise what we thought we already knew. You will feel more deeply engaged with the world by the time you are finished – and more ready to agitate for justice.' – Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine
'[SPACE] makes space for a freer range of expression within vice-tight infrastructures of meaning. Not a trivial word game or a pastime, [SPACE] returns the acts of ad libitum meaning-making to their theatrical and musical roots. Alexei Perry Cox urges improvisation and judicious renovation of the inherited script or score to generate agency for the actor and the player. Insisting on the difference between poetry and propaganda, literature and official discourse, [SPACE] recalls the generative charge of participatory spaces in books like Syd Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure and Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure. It links intertextual labour – the work of reading under fascist surveillance and censorship — to the repair and rebuilding of our shared, activist imagination. Alexei Perry Cox has offered a new way to interpret our condition, for readers under siege and under the rubble, from stolen tribal lands in North America to illegally occupied Palestinian lands, from the northern lakes to the rivers and to the seas. – Divya Victor, author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues) and KIN, forthcoming (Graywolf in 2027).
Praise for the Author:Winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry for THE LONG STUDY
‘Reading Alexei Perry Cox's PLACE for the first time I felt that rarest thing in poetry: the presence of a totally new voice. Or rather, I felt the presence of a totally new chorus of voices – brought together by Perry Cox – singing together in one language, in many languages, in Spanish, Arabic, English, Farsi, French, Mandarin, in joy, terror, history, beauty, physics, family, land. It's a wildly ambitious book, and the miracle is how boldly, capably, it charges into its ambitions, meeting them, often (impossibly!) exceeding them. Perry Cox writes, 'All my blood does is run headlong into life;' then she shows us.’ – Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
‘[PLACE’s] poetics of resistance moves between disillusionment and enchantment to ask: what can we do? How to gather, and with what materials? It’s about sustenance, both physical and spiritual. [B]y balancing contradiction, Perry Cox points to the relational nature of all things. In our conversation, I can’t help but point out the difficulty in this. She nods; “it’s ambitious to recognize the cells of yourself, the parts that are everything.” But necessary – by emphasizing this connective tissue, PLACE offers radical, strategic, and intuitive ways of being, where “what is beautiful, is revolutionary” and where “Revolution just is.”’ – Emma Telaro, Montreal Review of Books
‘In the author’s second full-length prose poetry collection, Perry Cox’s inquisitive nature shines through. In PLACE, the disciplines of language, anthropology, philosophy, history, and geography converge. Perry Cox embarks on an audacious journey to engage with these various fields through poetics in order to re-imagine a world that has been unscathed by colonialism, moral corruption, and forced exile.’ – Ashley Fish-Robertson, ROOM Magazine
‘Alexei Perry Cox leans into philosophy, linguistics, history – both recovered and imagined – and geography in an effort to understand herself, to place herself. Ghosts across time and language translate and retranslate themselves into a multi-lingual lyric weave. It's global poetry, sophisticated in thinking and structure and construction but raw and immediate in its import and impact.’ – Kazim Ali on PLACE
‘Cross out 'place,' and think instead of what sort of poetics may emerge from unceded, stolen, or lost land. Alexei Perry Cox's new powerful collection is written from a place that isn't one; a site that eludes borders. A diasporic and anti-nationalistic locus that insists on summoning ghosts. Perry Cox dexterously orchestrates multilingual conversations between historical and contemporary figures via citation and translation—two inherently relational practices. Revolutionary archives are re-organized into formally intricate poems, reminding us that '… embracing a newfound freedom is embracing the freedom to imagine it' (Rinaldo Walcott cited by Alexei Perry Cox). What results is an associative and at times dreamlike linguistic terrain capacious enough to hold the trying nature of revolutionary hope. In the company of so many, Alexei invites us to join an assembly in which imagining another form of citizenry together is momentarily possible.’ – Mirene Arsanios, author of The Autobiography of a Language, on PLACE