This week’s other featured books, “Ten Dollars to Hate,” by Patricia Bernstein and “Blindsided,” by Chelsea Catherine, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors post.
———————————–
THE BOOK: Futureless Languages.
PUBLISHED IN: 2018.
THE AUTHOR: Cindy Arrieu-King.
THE EDITORS: Ian Davisson and Ryan Eckes.
THE PUBLISHER: Radiator Press.
SUMMARY: My third full-length book of poetry Futureless Languages chronicles many endings we face these days: environmental, national, as well as personally elegaic. The pressure of the present is imbued into the necessity of harbingers, strategies for survival, ancient curses, evil kings like Richard III. The book says: Now we’ll say terrible goodbyes and move forward.
The book explores public and private loss framed by the linguistic idea of futureless languages: that when we use the present tense to refer to the future, we can steady ourselves to act rather than put off what seems like an unreachable horizon. This phenomenon allows me to write about a late friend’s love for life, the grief she feels for the environment, and for the children I did not have. Hinged to these personal subjects are the spectre of evil leaders, the protests and curses against them, and how we try to survive them.
THE BACK STORY: I actually was waiting for a different book to be queued up at a previous published. Ryan Eckes had seen poem drafts of mine during National Poetry Writing Month on Instagram and asked if I had a manuscript. I said I only had a few poems that might become a book but that I was interested in his offer. He and Ian Davisson, his co-editor, wanted to publish a book in the fall of that year and it as March, so I wrote the poems over the course of the summer of 2018. It was an intense experience to say the least, me holed up in the little library in the house where I grew up (the library that was my bedroom for a lot of my childhood). I saw how that to write a project with guideposts to reach emotionally and thematically, could bring so much unity to the book as a whole but also give me much deeper places to dive in my imagination. I had the time to understand how much my subconscious would give if it “knew” it had the room and it was fairly overwhelming: the sadness, the obsessiveness, the push.
WHY THIS TITLE? I felt that I kept encountering loss but in different forms: losing the chance to have a child of my own, losing a friend, losing a sense that the future would be fine. Since I had the new experience of writing a book as a project in a shorter amount of time, I knew I wanted to give it a focus rather than delving into one particular experience. I had already written a poem about losing my friend Hillary Gravendyk and it was titled “Futureless Languages”. I was paging through the few poems I started out with at the start of that intensive writing period and that title resonated: I knew this notion of the future being conflated with the present, of no longer existing as something abstract and distant could connect with the many different loses I was feeling.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? My book is unique because it thinks about time, language, community, arbingers, and notions of the future but is geared towards the collective of humanity, not simply my experience. How do we refresh language in order to come together as a species, to dispel illusions?
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“And here, there is light forever. Consider that. Consider, if here is always where you are, the sentence: “She said the most radical thing she ever did was stay put,” Arrieu-King writes in the same poem we began with. And it is, Sagittarius. It is the most radical thing.”–Geneva Chao.
“You have no future because you are in it. And so, what is now? What does it feel like, what is its real language? Is someone or something dying, going on, or gone? Cynthia Arrieu-King is a gifted, present poet, but I forget her, reading this (and it is hers) account of a world going more and more “off” — off-base, out of kilter, not like some previously perceptible “normal”: it is real, and it is a dream. The souring world is a dream. But this is such an interesting book! The author is an honest tracker, so you never know, finally, what she’ll say, in her own futureless language.” —Alice Notley.
“Futureless Languages is a manual for you written in the sound of the wind, in the language “the air in the rock speaks.” A mixed tape of things “beyond interpretation.”…King writes a poetry of now that bears out how language already accesses tomorrows: a simple switch of tense changes everything, like the time traveler who butterfly-effects their own birth. While they hold language’s paradoxes, these poems hold the world’s too. “Every time I watch the news I delete a few more poems.”—but the ones that remain brim with the fragile power of the poet’s word. That power whose truth still get poets detained.” — Ana Božičević
AUTHOR PROFILE: I grew up in Louisville Kentucky and am a former Kundiman fellow. I’ve lived in river towns–Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville and have traveled to many places in Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. I love learning languages, making garments, and napping.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: The book asks what if we cannot consider the past as something we learn from, and the future as a room we can pretend we don’t see? And how will we come together to dispel these illusions and thereby improve ourselves as human beings?
SAMPLE CHAPTER: You can go to the Verse Press website and find my Playlist which includes five of my poems. https://verse.press/playlist/futureless-languages-3802311521929708096.
LOCAL OUTLETS: Novel on Passyunk in Philadelphia.
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Small Press Distribution, the Radiator Press website.
PRICE: $15.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: You can reach me on Gmail at arrieuking.
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 