Description: You are asking me where I live and it's making me think all these things about space,
where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I'm a book, in space. So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to "non-linear and hyper gestural movement," a communal spirit. Her inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and "fictional knowing." Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave's Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary it its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.Review Quotes: Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer--she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes.
--Eileen Myles
Gladman's talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication.
--Publishers Weekly
This attention to the movement and moment of the line distinguishes her work from those other experiments with drawn poems, such as Robert Grenier's drawing poems or Cy Twombly's calligraphic paintings, that we might reach to for comparison....It's as if she's discovered the place where the living line and the line of language converge after a temporary separation.--Mary Wilson, Jacket2