Description
Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy
Abstractive
ISBN: 9780998460703
142 pages
Full Color Paperback
$34.95
April 2026
Poetry, Artist’s Books, African American Arts & Culture
Nhã Thuyên on Abstractive:
how form from foam
falls out
gleaming
and subsides
sun on stone
broken down to sand
stunning tone
eroding bone
blown
They speak, within the collaborative form of Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy, and hold, in front of our eyes, or our mind’s eyes, “an artist’s book of poems and images that think alongside and through the experiments of poet Russell Atkins.” But to think alongside and think through an active process of Atkins’s abstractiveness perhaps requires us to move away from its source, to drip through the holes of shapes and sounds, to slip down a hill(ku) and to fall on its own syntax of a freshly formed abstractiveness.
what life hides when inside.
it’s the abstract
How could I read into the abstractive that is distilling and soiling the linguistic and visual materials at the same time, how could I see the energetic procedure of every element of sounds and images pulling and pushing each other if I don’t let myself be involved in these pulls and pushes.
The form of this collaborative book, or perhaps just like of many collaborations, between writers and artists, undulates within the serendipitous spans of words and images and sounds. There is a calling, a requirement to have a bony structure that you can rely on, physically and mentally, and the slipperiness that causes every element of its structure to fall out from its body, and for these elements falling out over its form to exist. There is no pure abstraction, there is no – no recognisable subject and/or no peculiar object. A flow of sound and image constantly disrupts, mixing up and messing up, stretching and folding into different versions and having no reassuring demeanor. I read the texts and the visuals separately and all together, at times encountering a recognisable yet unfamiliar line and word and sound, a palimpsest of marks and dots of ink that
waking, wanting permanent reprieve
breathe, dripped out.
Hà nội, 7 April 2026
—Nhã Thuyên, author of don’t hide the madness
Additional Praise for Abstractive:
“For Russell Atkins, the ‘psychovisualist’ composes structured relationships that can be viscerally felt by the mind’s eye. In Abstractive, readers learn to lean on the way those structures snare hidden connections: between visual and language arts, music and emotion, and everyone out there searching for the ancient heavenly connection. We are on the cusp.”—Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality
“Here is vivacious visual and textual collaboration where melodic lines act as a counterpoint of philosophic riffing so that signification is expansively flung open delivering vantage points galore, tantalizing consciousness. ‘Form sets off everywhere’. We are treated to a cacophony in words accompanied by intense, colorful images. Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy conjure the living legacy of Russell Atkins and the results are exquisite!”—Brenda Iijima, author of Presence
“Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy set off a collaborative sensory sweep via these polyphonic and polyrhythmic poems, ‘ensorcellating’ an expansive tonality playing within and around image and word. These poems seek a mental music that ‘avoids fitting into the chord,’ ‘innuendoewing’ around the breakage of each eroding word. We are borne through the revelation of a doubled ‘mind in flight’: poetry as ongoing, unceasing dialogic process. Following Candance Hill Montgomery’s incredible long poem, Short Leash Kept On (Materials 2022), this is a thrilling and essential work.”—Geoffrey Olsen, author of Nerves Between Song
From the Authors’ Note:
Abstractive is a collaboration in words and images. It was begun in person at Candace Hill Montgomery’s house in Bridgehampton while David Grundy was on an artist’s residency at The Church, Sag Harbor in Summer 2024, and continued virtually into Winter 2024, with final additions and revisions in late 2025 and early 2026. The title comes from poet-composer Russell Atkins, who passed away in summer 2024 at the age of 98, and whose work in concrete and ‘abstractive’ poetry as far back as the 1940s forms part of a lineage of Black experimentation and abstraction that has long been ignored or glossed over. The word ‘abstractive’ emphasizes abstraction not as fixed destination but as dynamic process: a collaborative dialogue, between writers, between language and image, between representation and what lies beyond or beneath or around it. […] We’re drawn to music and visuals and poems that are polyrhythmic and polyphonic, speaking across and speaking over as well as speaking up or speaking about. Our collaboration aims to incorporate the mess and messages of notes, sketches, drafts, and journal jottings, the multiple places where ideas come in, all the ways in which we’re lead to abstract thought: the unsmoothed edges, the unclean part. The mind’s eye and the mind’s ear both seek and refuse the fixity which music and word and image dance around. Improvising within the improvisation, and improvisation within the edit. In other words: composition.
About the Authors:
The work of Candace Hill Montgomery spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing. Making and exhibiting since the 1970s, Hill Montgomery was born in 1945 in Queens, New York, and now lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition, Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, at Blank Forms, New York. Recent group exhibitions include From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, 2025); Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, 2025) and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens (London, 2024). Her latest publications include the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, “Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment” by Amy Tobin, was published in Art History, Volume 46. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens in London and will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in June 2026.
David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He runs the small press Materials.
