Attention Span 2010 – Elizabeth Treadwell

Vine Deloria, Jr. | Spirit & Reason | Fulcrum | 1999

“We should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity.”

Stephanie Rioux | My Beautiful Beds | Parrot 1/Insert | 2010

“each eye ajar upon the animalised blot”

Christine Wertheim, ed. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010

“…in the grass green skin of one’s humanness…”
—Caroline Bergvall

Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg, eds. | Gurlesque | Saturnalia | 2010

“These boobs are real”—Dorothea Lasky

Carrie Etter, ed. | Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets | Shearsman | 2010

“Yet none have hard real edges, since each one
is rightly spilled over, from the start of her life.”
—Denise Riley

Jane Campion | Bright Star | Pathe International | 2009

Who would not go for sweet skinny Keats all in his word dream? Although I haven’t loved her films equally (“Portrait of a Lady,” “In the Cut”), I am so grateful for Campion’s very particular, and particularly female, comprehension and sensibility. I appreciate the ways she portrays kids and families, and the varied ways my three favorites of hers — “An Angel at My Table” and “Holy Smoke” in addition to this new one — portray young women’s individuality and seeking as very much an outgrowth of and supported, however imperfectly, by family love. Kerry Fox, who once played Janet Frame in “An Angel” is here the mom, which leaves me happily aging.

Sara Larsen | Novus | Earthworm | 2009

In this bright orange chapbook and in the film above, I really appreciated the centrality of a young woman’s brave, pleased, idiosyncratic, non-monetized sexual loving. As we attempt to live despite each day & ages synthetic limitations, we could use a fuck of a lot more of this.

Nella Larsen | Passing | Knopf/Penguin | 1929/2003

10x finer than Melanctha.

Louise Erdrich | Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country | National Geographic | 2003

“Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”

Rebecca Skloot | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Crown | 2010

“If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.”
—an unnamed relative of Henrietta Lacks, as quoted by Rebecca Skloot

More Elizabeth Treadwell here. Treadwell’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2010 directory

Featured Title – In the Pines by Alice Notley

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 7 mentions in Attention Span 2008

The American sound, clear and chill—need I explain? (Simon Schuchat)

Dark, uncomfortable, haunting dream-speech. Recalls for me Spicer’s medium-like approach in works like Heads of the Town Up to the Ether. (K. Silem Mohammad)

Because of the way she can deal with subjectivity, the subject constituting itself in private, in public spaces, and over and over again, not an incomplete subject but one in motion against death and ruinous politics. And the way she works with narrative, image. (Erin Mouré)

Also mentioned by Elizabeth Treadwell, Allyssa Wolf, David Dowker, and G.C. Waldrep.

*

Alice Notley was the most-mentioned author in Attention Span 2007, with eight mentions for four separate titles, including Alma, or the Dead Women and Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems, 1970-2005.

Grave of Light also featured in Attention Span 2006.

Three titles—Coming After: Essays on Poetry, Disobedience, and From the Beginning—were included in Attention Span 2005. Disobedience was also mentioned in Attention Span 2003.