Nothing less than a journey behind the scenes of her own creative process, Leah Souffrant's Entanglements embraces the contingency, incompletion, difficulty, and uncertainty of artistic practice. At once intellectually rigorous and winningly immediate, Souffrant's genre-busting collection conveys the fundamental "ways we come to know and create the world we inhabit and experience, both as experience and through experience." Informed by her wide and deep knowledge of critical theory, aesthetics, and history - and by the fierce and compassionate spirit of feminist dissent - Souffrant includes the reader in her dynamic and emancipatory "poetics of non-delimiting." Entanglements is Souffrant's second book.
Leah Souffrant makes art, poetry, essays, and criticism. She is the author of Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable. Her recent work can be found in Bone Bouquet, Interim: Poetry and Poetics, Jacket2, Poet Lore, Formes Poétique Contemporaines, Seisma Magazine's Studio Lab Showcase, and Speak the Magazine. Souffrant has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Center for the Study of Women & Society. She teaches at New York University.
"Turning away from the noise of straightforward confession, Leah Souffrant chooses instead the murmuring intertext, the silent and slow route of listening to the shudder of language at those sonorous points where suffering and rapture collide and then part ways. Studying Entanglements entangles me in Souffrant's open-hearted archive, and renews my faith in the poetics of bibliomancy, that charmed zone where yearning and reading intersect, and where Souffrant, terse as Duras, shows us how to feel at home." - Wayne Koestenbaum
"The force of Leah Souffrant's roving, probing mind and the remarkable distances it both maps and collapses is exquisite. In this inspiriting, genre-refuting work, we encounter life's difficult enmeshings, richly braided together with critical acuity, care, and verve. Souffrant's vision, and what it alights on, is sui generis." - Jenny Xie
"A capacious, loving textile where meditations become fibers through which questions about art, memory, love, and human relationships intertwine, Leah Souffrant's Entanglements will change how you think about reading, texts and bodily encounters with the world. Entanglements pulls at the fibers of history and humanity, inviting the reader to think about new ways of touching life and its artifacts. Simply put, this is a gorgeous book—and the reader will, too, become entangled in its brilliance and artistry and emerge changed." - Tyler Mills
"Love, memory, meaning, nation, narrative — with Entanglements Leah Souffrant touches every thread of the web, causing vibrations that remind us of how we are bound to the world and one another. That frisson, of coming into contact with the invisible, might once have been evidence of witchcraft, but now it is how we recognize poetry of colossal proportions. To look so unflinchingly at the invisible web that holds everything together, to feel its umbilical tug on your own life, requires a form of courage that Souffrant has in spades and, with her writing, she'll lend you some." - Abby Paige
"Entanglements is a true text in the etymological traces of the word: both the act of weaving and the object woven. Leah Souffrant braids the philosophical, lyrical, bodily, gestural—historical memory and the memory of skin and sensation—in this mobile interface of transitions. In its vibrating incantations, Souffrant's multimodal Entanglements rims generic borders…with indulgent thoughtfulness and disarming intimacy." - Chris Campanioni
