I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee
These poems are excerpted from Annelyse Gelman’s Heck Land: The Resorted Text, a lyrical reworking of the definitive edition of William S. Burroughs’s seminal anti-novel Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. There are twenty-five in all—one for each chapter of Naked Lunch—each a scalpeled, reappropriated cut-up tape-mounted to projector transparency, then photographed recto and verso, along with dust, fingerprints, squashed bugs, and other process artifacts.
Annelyse Gelman’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Landfall, the PEN Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She is the author of Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014).
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Featuring interviews with Chris Martin, Cy Gavin, Tauba Auerbach, Sam Hillmer, Amy Jenkins, Florian Meisenberg, John Akomfrah, Simone Forti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Anna Moschovakis
I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee