With Perturbation, My Sister
(1997), Prevallet wrote through Max Ernst's collage work La femme 100 têtes, sharply turning the tables on gendered Surrealist abjection with nine sections of prose fiction "gently laughing as fires burn through brick, and rioters collapse in exclamatory fits." This follow-up presents nine fresh sets of appropriation, visual collage and startling writing. Kicking off with "Lead, Glass, and Poppy," Prevallet constructs energetic, split-page juxtaposition of comet halos, disc-like patterns of charred remains on earth, disappearing cultures, and a scene of writing where "the liberties taken are/ someone's surface,/ a story not meant to be torn apart." The ingenious "Reading Index (texte indice)" plots its points on split-page graph paper: the lower part contains parabolas of text; the upper page putatively graphs one's reading experience of it, with the X axis representing time, and the Y axis ascending via terms like "Abstraction," "Code," "Association," "Fear" and "Anger." It's a wholly unique piece that gently sends up self-reflection and science. Selections from "The People Database" is part of a project conceived by Brussels-based artist Annemie Maes, who has posted found passport photos (often in bad shape) on the Web, and invited poets to respond to them. Prevallet's prose pieces are a kind of globalist outreach, groping for ways in which "my features can be sculpted into your features and your features into mine." The remaining projects are just as canny, engaged and empathetic; this book marks a real advance in image-text-based cultural poetics, and the emergence of a poet to watch. (Nov.)
Forecast:Prevallet teaches at Bard College and has written on pedagogy for
Poets & Writers magazine. Her third book,
The Parasite Poems, is due this spring; look for summative reviews in small-press magazines covering all three titles.
