Award Winners
Norma Farber First Book Award - 2008
Catherine Imbriglio
COMMUNION
I called you names, for the further processing of color or movement, all you were able to get into, a sort of blur. She leaned out against the water. Lay me down like anthozoa to anthozoa, with the other light things that brush against the earth. Breathe. Don't breathe. Breathe. A figure in a constellation was staring off. Did it turn up three days later, did it accept inside its body, a no for universal application, an only mine or yours? Gate One. Open your mouth. If you would only open your mouth. Gate Two. To bridle, to curb, to dam. Gate Three. Anagnorisis. Gate Four. Closed. Gate Five. Hold up. Gate Six. If everywhere that Mary went, the brain was public and exposed. Gate Seven. Do you mind, do you. Gate Eight. Fish moving in the boat's direction will be recorded in our diagram with the more substantial marks. Gate Nine. The rhythm and interval between objects. Gate Ten. Our simplest subject. Our lightest lights. Our darkest darks.
Thylias Moss on Catherin Imbriglio
Catherine Imbriglio's Parts of the Mass
—as its start,
It begins with collapse, with a generalized flattening, an apparently leveled playing field, with apparent covert access to everything—the broad path to the meaning of existence
but no; the naked flatness
is not undressed.
There is the matter of scale.
Parts of the Mass of substance also.
The thingness of stuff
which having mass can be subject to measure.
Imbriglio studies the parts in a laboratory into which collapse has flattened, and here, to expose the components of a generalized flattening,
Imbriglio uses tools that extend scale, that expose deficits in unassisted perception (so shame can be perceived)
—the spires and valleys, the textured flatness that is less smooth than seemed invited.
Magnify it and this appears, this erupts—there is quadrupling of space; the peak is huge, holds universes.
There is a rage of momentum in this book
rage of shapes, rage of configurations and reconfigurations
in the close quarters of proximity, for everything touches by degrees, me to what seems distant by the links between us:
oh the chain, chain, chain process Imbriglio knows well;
no way of looking not also part of what can be looked at,
other sides of ourselves
in the kaleidoscopic patterns predicted by collapses
but actually proven and examined in the many microscopes, each with kaleidoscopic lens systems, that Imbriglio uses with aplomb.
Things touch, and contact is always, is necessarily a mating of parts, and a birth results, the birth of a merged distorted hybrid form,
such births occurring in every direction, the touching occurring on all sides of every part and every part within part,
movement that is also music.
Apparently God does indeed play dice,
Catherine Imbriglio's an example of a universe
that resulted from a roll of the dice.
In this universe, the parts remain similar, but the configuration is unexpected and stunning, and one that this universe should envy.
Reassembly was necessary.