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the dust of a contact that is everywhere moves between theoretical reflection and aesthetic practice through essays, fragments, daybook entries, and lyrical experiments. It explores attention, the temporality of lyric lines, and the ethical implications of how we read, write, and live beside others. Collage and drift function as both method and ethic; friendship becomes a form of nonhierarchical inquiry. Drawing on artists and thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Toru Takemitsu, the book is a capacious and intimate work of reading understood as a form of radical attentiveness.
Price: $8.00
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Imprint: BUNNY
Publication Date:
24 March 2026
ISBN: 9781964499666
Format: eBook
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics
Raymond de Borja has been at the cutting edge of innovative poetry for some time. His self-reflexive poesis carries forward the bold work of modernism into inventive new valences. Now he gives us a book of essays and meditations that are equally rich, strange, and compelling. Ranging from Jack Spicer, to the genre of the daybook and the poetics of lineation in Hejinian, Stein, Guest, and Berssenbrugge, to visual art, these essays thrill with their vivid illuminating investigations. the dust of a contact that is everywhere is bold and visionary – it is not to be missed!
— Patrick Pritchett, author of Make It Broken: Toward A Poetics Of Late Modernism
Out of language forged from attentive engagements with philosophy, art, and poetry, Raymond de Borja takes us to this place of moving potentiality, this occasion that is the dust of a contact that is everywhere. Intertwining friendship with form, de Borja traces and teases out the threads of this lush correspondence, moving the reader to apprehend the various kinships inscribed in poems as well as poetry's peculiar means to convene and cultivate kinships. Alongside a keen awareness of the "feeble outer power" of poems, de Borja offers a compelling demonstration of the ways that poetry reworks how we sense and make sense of the world, refuting the seemingly ineluctable capture by empire and capital of our very capacity to perceive. To read this book is to experience the kindness and generosity of a true friendship, as it invites the reader to inhabit a "shared, common strangeness" that I take to be a hope-filled "space in which we could live a creative life.
— Conchitina Cruz
— Patrick Pritchett, author of Make It Broken: Toward A Poetics Of Late Modernism
Out of language forged from attentive engagements with philosophy, art, and poetry, Raymond de Borja takes us to this place of moving potentiality, this occasion that is the dust of a contact that is everywhere. Intertwining friendship with form, de Borja traces and teases out the threads of this lush correspondence, moving the reader to apprehend the various kinships inscribed in poems as well as poetry's peculiar means to convene and cultivate kinships. Alongside a keen awareness of the "feeble outer power" of poems, de Borja offers a compelling demonstration of the ways that poetry reworks how we sense and make sense of the world, refuting the seemingly ineluctable capture by empire and capital of our very capacity to perceive. To read this book is to experience the kindness and generosity of a true friendship, as it invites the reader to inhabit a "shared, common strangeness" that I take to be a hope-filled "space in which we could live a creative life.
— Conchitina Cruz
Raymond de Borja (Author)
Raymond de Borja is the author of the dust of a contact that is everywhere (Fonograf Editions / Bunny Presse), facture (Broken Sleep Books), as well, in our estrangement (Aklat Ulagad), and they day daze (High Chair). He lives in the Philippines.
Paolo Javier (Foreword by)
Paolo Javier has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), and was a featured artist in PS1 MoMA’s Greater NY and Queens International. SWERVE, his collaboration with experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, debuted at BAM Cinemafest. He is the author of seven books of poetry, and lives with his family in Jackson Heights, Lenapehoking.
Raymond de Borja is the author of the dust of a contact that is everywhere (Fonograf Editions / Bunny Presse), facture (Broken Sleep Books), as well, in our estrangement (Aklat Ulagad), and they day daze (High Chair). He lives in the Philippines.
Paolo Javier (Foreword by)
Paolo Javier has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), and was a featured artist in PS1 MoMA’s Greater NY and Queens International. SWERVE, his collaboration with experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, debuted at BAM Cinemafest. He is the author of seven books of poetry, and lives with his family in Jackson Heights, Lenapehoking.