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Wave Archive
Is it possible to archive the invisible symptoms of an illness? Is the archive emotional? Emmalea Russo's Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness. Praise for Wave Archive : "Plumbing a myriad of archives both personal and historical, Emmalea Russo's Wave Archive is an exploratory foray into the nature of the author's living with and attending to epilepsy. The book is as various and hard to pin down as the condition it part catalogue of the mind and its internal and external functioning; part meditation on the process of artistic creation; part disjunctive lyric essay; part poetic reckoning with the language of Owsei Temkin's 1945 history of epilepsy, The Falling Sickness ; and part inscrutable literary alchemy all its own, an attempt to 'touch the space between interior and exterior.' The thinking throughout is restless, resists pat conclusions, revels in movement. 'It is raw material / but it shouldn?t look like / raw material to be used / it should look already activated / but also, at the same time, sleepy.' Following her own alchemical logic, Russo has forged an intrepid compartment, 'an archive for the changes of the waves of the brain.' This archive is wild.? —Daniel Owen, author of Restaurant Samsara "This beautiful book moves in a way I've never before experienced, transforming the reader through its pages. Wave Archive seeks to articulate the incomprehensible, invisible processes of epilepsy, of art-making, of how we categorize the world, suggesting these forces are connected in dazzling ways we?ve yet to comprehend. It is ambitious, pleasurable, and startlingly original." —Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment
- GenresPoetry
162 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2019
69 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 14, 2022
“When you say ‘I� you don't know what you mean. You wake up worn out, disappointed that you know your name.�
September 15, 2024
“some women are rational / some archives are emotional�
lots of really interesting prose and linguistic explorations here, but i left feeling confused and detached—a bummer because i’ve loved russo’s writing in the past! some of the formal choices weren’t really my cup of tea� a few too many random punctuation marks and vague poetic charts for my personal taste. an overall mix of great lines (“when you say ‘i� you don’t know what you mean. you wake up worn out, disappointed that you know your name�) and not-as-great lines (“all of your energy, negative (- - -) and positive (+ + +), has been released and you are a pure version of you. you equal (= = =) yourself�)
lots of really interesting prose and linguistic explorations here, but i left feeling confused and detached—a bummer because i’ve loved russo’s writing in the past! some of the formal choices weren’t really my cup of tea� a few too many random punctuation marks and vague poetic charts for my personal taste. an overall mix of great lines (“when you say ‘i� you don’t know what you mean. you wake up worn out, disappointed that you know your name�) and not-as-great lines (“all of your energy, negative (- - -) and positive (+ + +), has been released and you are a pure version of you. you equal (= = =) yourself�)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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