The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
84 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-5-1 

This hybrid text of prose and poetry brings Helene Cixous to mind. Both writers share a style, mastery of theory and concern for the poetics of reading and writing lives, selves, memory, history and the spaces in-between. History belongs to the domain of the universe. We must be gentle with it …  That may be the antidote to the shame of being alive, says Konyalian Grenier. The elusive prose moments presented in these eight pieces beg an unknowing; maybe we don’t know or fully understand, but can we stay with it and feel something in the process? Philosophy fails, but does silence? How to get from the brain to the heart is the task, she notes, and there is a sense that somewhere within the slippery but hopeful silences of these words, there, between the pages and a refusal to catalog and customize and cure us of the human, the way is lit. As she notes, hope lives there, a materiality that is luminous and forgiving of matter. Where “the word” meets itself is where we are – at the concession stand - magical and mundane a space that welcomes exaptation, possibilities.

 

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