Description

From Kevin Killian’s 2012 entry on Attention Span:

Drescher is a new writer to me but apparently she’s been writing quite a bit in Texas, where, she writes, “vulture [is] // the first / new word // learned here.” Her writing is enough to strip flesh from a bone, and in this book at any rate she is concentrating on surfaces, what’s behind them, what obscures them—like the old Pentimento concept that Lillian Hellman wrote about in her memoir. The back cover presents a typical Cy Twomblyesque abstracted drip of pinks and grays and ochres, and the front cover carves words out of it by framing its colors with a maquette of white cut to reveal the letters hidden within. “Hands chalk the walls”—reportage of revolutionary graffiti event, or H.D.-War Trilogy affirmation of alwaysness? “Slick wreck I // weathered // longing / swell / a sea / in pencil.” I’m reading the evidence both ways, including the possibility that it’s the game we used to play as kids, challenged to turn (say) “face” into “head” in five moves.