Full cover spread · click to enlarge
About the Book
The first volume in Hyperbole Books’s Bi Sheng/Juan Pablos Digitovisuo Artifacts series—a line built to scramble the border between literature, visual art, and critical theory—Amy Sara Carroll’s Secession is a full-color collision of lyric writing, printmaking, image, interview, and essay. Its pages turn “secession” into both subject and method: a way of cutting across inherited divisions between word and image, private and public, nation and border, body and theory.
Carroll’s poems and linoleum-block prints move through sexuality, colonization, femininity, border consciousness, and the politics of form without settling into a single genre. The result is less a conventional poetry collection than a designed textual performance—one in which reading and seeing keep interrupting, complicating, and energizing one another.
The volume also extends that experiment through interviews and critical essays, making Secession a conversation about poetry as public practice as much as a book of poems. For readers of poetry, art, cultural studies, art history, critical theory, gender studies, queer studies, and border literature, it remains one of Hyperbole Books’s most unapologetically hybrid objects.
Winner · 2013 Louis I. Bredvold Prize for Scholarly or Creative Publication, University of Michigan
Winner · 2013 Golden Crown Literary Society Poetry Award
Advance Praise
“Amy Sara Carroll writes like an acrobat, with tongue-twisting, out of breath lines, that always land on their feet. Secession challenges us in the best ways possible to rethink sexuality, borders, colonization, femininity, and poetry itself.”— Angie Cruz, Assistant Professor of English, Texas A&M, College Station, & author of Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee
“Secession is ‘Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out. Solo en sueños, en la poesía, en el juego…’ These borrowed lines, from the opening page of Carroll’s brilliant book, frame a photograph of a framed graphic poem-print covered in part by the plastic wand of a pregnancy stick. These images are not juxtaposed, but rather pose questions of art and politics, the intimate and the expansive. The textured layers of Carroll’s composed words and pictures are pregnant with meaning. They beckon us to engage them in all their performative experimentation. This is a book of haptic allusion, illuminations, and she-er wonder. Enjoy!”— Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Drama and Performance Studies, Stanford University, & author of Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play
“In the spirit of other queer artists who have had to invent hybrid forms such as graphic narrative and solo performance to say what hasn’t been said, Amy Sara Carroll renews poetry’s tradition of radical practice. Reminding us that poetry is a form of craft, she cuts into a linoleum block to make poems that you can literally see. As the words pile up against one another in both her poem prints and her blocks of lines on the page, she also makes poetry that you can feel. Carroll shows us that secession splits open not just countries but hearts; but, in her new world of the poem as image, unlikely combinations of words and phrases suggest new forms of affiliation. The interviews and critical essays included in this volume extend the conversation begun in the poems, further contributing to Secession’s vision of poetry as public practice.”— Ann Cvetkovich, Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas, Austin, & author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
“I want to say Secession is Blakean in that printmaking-meets-poetry sort of way. And then I want to say it is feminist in that ‘¡viva la vulva!’ way. And then I want to say it is a contact zone in that Guamán Poma sort of way. Few books manage to bring together so much, to think with so many differences. So what I really mean is that Secession is an unusual and lovely book, one that is resonant and yet also singular, smart, and sexy.”— Juliana Spahr, Associate Professor of English, Mills College, & author of This Connection of Everything with Lungs and Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity
Inside Secession
Interior page · click to enlarge
About Amy Sara Carroll
Amy Sara Carroll is a poet, critic, and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves across poetry, performance, border studies, art history, and experimental media. She is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her books include Secession, Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography, and REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era.
Carroll received her Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University. Since 2008 she has also worked with Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab, including on the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
