"Like Scheherazade pulling beginnings out of the middles of stories to save her own life" — Darcie Denningan & Kate Schapira
Cover art: "Montana Night" by Victoria Burge
Excerpt ˇ
Excerpt
If there’s a theme to this work, it’s reflexiveness. If there’s a general impetus, it’s a would-be completism. I chip away at, as well as with, the words of which I am made for the momentary thrill of cracking through to the other side of my language-delimited self and getting a glimpse of the extra-linguistic conditions that might exist there—some kind of vestigial memory or form of perception that can’t be caught with words. But I have a sense that I can only get there by saying—exhausting myself via words, exhausting words. Close ˆAbout the Author
Kate Colby is author of six books, including Unbecoming Behavior (UDP, 2008), The Return of the Native (UDP, 2011) and Fruitlands (Litmus Press), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2007. She is a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she was a 2012 fellow of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.
Book Details
Trade PaperbackPerfect-bound. 128 pp, 5.75 x 8 in.
ISBN 978-1-937027-45-2
Publication Date: June 1, 2015
Distribution: SPD
- 08.01.16 | Kate Colby in conversation with Mary-Kim Arnold on The Conversant
- 01.22.16 | Kate Colby's I Mean reviewed by Nichole Reber in New Pages
- 01.05.16 | Kate Colby's I Mean reviewed by Nichole L. Reber in New Pages
- 09.08.15 | Kate Colby's I Mean reviewed in Publishers Weekly
- 06.05.15 | Kate Colby's I Mean reviewed in The Arava Review
- 05.06.15 | I Mean by Kate Colby reviewed on Queen Mob's Teahouse
News and Reviews
Advance Praise
In this stunning collection of poetry and lyric essay, Kate Colby ruminates iteratively, almost recursively over questions of scale and knowability: “The scale of language is human, and humans do not exist on a comprehensive scale.” The title poem uses a series of “I mean” statements (“I mean it’s major // I mean in motion // I mean pictures”) in a performance of clarification, but the accumulation of contradictory meanings (“self-supplanting palimpsests”) disrupts the text’s ability to mean anything stable; standalone attempts at meaning become, en masse, a conceptual inquiry into semantics. Colby grasps again and again at the ineffable or rather the almost-effable—she does not want to capture X so much as to convey X through the grasping itself, to circumscribe what can’t be expressed. At times, she achieves this so spectacularly—in “moments of euphoric clarity”—it makes me want to cry.—Elisa Gabbert
Like Scheherazade pulling beginnings out of the middles of stories to save her own life, I Mean denies its readers endings. Instead, its equations, erupting into multiple registers and digressions, which it constantly longs to contain and constantly fails to contain, give us opportunities: to argue with our own language, trace our own deferrals, and wonder, if a definitive ending or answer were to arrive, what we would do with it. Constant qualifications impede the “then” of I Mean's “if's”, and never solving them helps the reader learn to listen and the speaker survive, by any means necessary.—Darcie Denningan & Kate Schapira
Using its title anaphoristically and clocking in at nearly 70 pages, the title poem is a tight, nimble, and wide-ranging work that manages to, in the author's words, "pile words up/ and wrap the referents around them" in a remarkably fun and conceptually virtuosic way. The essays also display an erudition that can be both heady and playful… With verve and purpose, Colby plays trick after alluring trick to write herself in and out of meaning.—Publishers Weekly