Voir Dire - by Nico Vassilakis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

VOIR DIRE is Nico Vassilakis' seventh book of poetry. With this volume, Vassilakis continues to carry us along toward the metaphysical unmooring of language material or put otherwise, how staring at writing itself can induce a transformative experience so as to alter the very act of seeing. This collection unfolds with engaging reading text and goes straight through to the psychology of seeing text anew. The very nature of visual interpretation of language is tinkered with. This book of writing is deliberate with its drifts in form and content, but attempts to loosely resolve the unifying theory that the contents of an alphabet are of higher import than the words they create. VOIR DIRE unravels in three sections, the book travels from appropriation to the politics and investigations of seeing to a manifesto, of sorts, extolling the sovereignty of letters. The journey moves the reader from a gathering of words through to one word and into a singular letter - a focused point. Vassilakis advances us further into considering how poetry and its ingredients can be understood visually and how visual poetry can be encountered with a critical eye.

Nico Vassilakis is a poet who writes and draws language that focuses on the visual jettisoning of letters from their word position. He has published books of poetry and text/art including Disparate Magnets (BlazeVOX), Alphabet Noir (c_L Books), Moments Notice (Luna Bisonte), Diesel Hand (Chax Press), Text Loses Time (ManyPenny) and Diptychs (Otolith). He co-edited The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (Fantagraphics) and was a curator of several international visual/concrete poetry exhibitions. He currently lives in Greenville, IL with his wife and animals.

Review Quotes

How many ways do seeing and saying separate, coalesce, contradict, and divide? As many as there are combinations of letters in the alphabet that do and do not form words, and are entered into temporal sequences, fit to be tied with marbled moods. This is Vassilakis at his most confessional, as he tells us what he most seeks is that "wonky second when the brain doesn't know how to process incoming information . . . .The letters like an off-grid dinosaur lumbering and uttering, keeping our early developmental selves alongside our adult frame." Jeanne Heuving

Expleted, completed, depleted. Letters (aka alphabets) will always turn out to have been humanity's most destructive invention - shadow companions right to skinny end, black dot-matrix dogs of chalkboard traumas. In this curricular scene, being an illegible subject is your best defense, against bullets, bullet-points, power, power-point, rules and rulers. Molten instruments for sure, these writings might also be ambient field recordings of an alphabet's unconscious, through its letters' hypersleep journeys to other destinations. Off-world, off-pivot, out-of-centre. De-parliamentarised, thrown out of government jobs, slow cruising towards a consensus that can never be reached. An autogestion spacetime craft of the fundamentals. Yep, socialism will always turn out to have been the only solution. It can launch (as it does here) with a series of serendipitous explosions. A conjure-gawk sowing gapeseed, an audacious carp, a freaky duck with webbed touch, muddling intermeddler diapered in inks? Oh, you mean N-I-C-O V-A-S-S-I-L-A-K-I-S. Everyone ever homeschooled by that guy started a new civilization. Donato Mancini