Textile Artist Candace Hill's First Book Operates in the African-American Experimental Poetry Tradition

At his blog, Streams of Expression, David Grundy has done a splendid job of introducing the Queens-born weaver, teacher, and writer Candace Hill, whose book of poems, Muss Sill, is the newest publication from Distance No Object, a London-based small press. Don't let the press's minimal web presence fool you: their publications are gorgeous, considered—and as evidenced here, likely quite significant—poetry objects.

"Hill is best known as an artist working in photography, mixed-media collage, and watercolor," Grundy writes. As for the poems themselves, they "operate in a tradition of African American experimental poetry … that territory critics like Aldon Nielsen have so painstakingly tried to bring into the consciousness of a literary-historical model that almost entirely ignores them." He then connects Hill's work to that of Julie Patton and Russell Atkins, among others. A short excerpt:

…Though she’s previously worked with words as part of images, this is her first collection of stand-alone poems. But it doesn’t easily fit the paradigm of artist’s book, book by artist, studio journal, manifesto. Hill instead more closely resembles—in level of focus, if not the work itself—artist-poets like Etel Adnan, for whom the disciplines of art and poetry are not subsidiary to each other, nor mirror reflections, but equally-weighted paths of investigation. The poems are ‘stand-alone’ in being purely textually based: but they also ‘stand alone’ in their distinctiveness. They’re poems that fit most every definition of ‘unique’, ‘individual’, ‘not like any other’: at the same time, they rarely rest for any authority on the originating or binding consciousness of the mind’s I that spawns their strings of creative association. That’s to say, they sound like nothing but their (multiple) selves. Sometimes ecstatically beside themselves, sometimes in the position of the sardonic observer standing to the side, the poems are clearly the product of a very particular, very individual linguistic consciousness: they reflect a very specific way of seeing, hearing or speaking the world in words that’s unlike other, more familiar ways of seeing, hearing, or speaking the world; that, in the dictionary definition of idiolect, manifests “the speech habits peculiar to a particular person”—a condition after all, that governs the productive tensions of speech itself.

We can't wait for this book! Read more about it here, and at Distance No Object.