#RECURRENT IS REIMAGINING STORYTELLING. IS INNOVATIVE LITERATURE. IS WRITING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS.
– Janice Lee
When I started the #RECURRENT series initially with Jaded Ibis Press, it was with the intent to feature 3 particularly innovative novels that both carried on the legacy of the novel as an important, historical & unique literary structure, as well as to reimagine the novel as interface and interactive narrative.
I’m excited to officially announce that #RECURRENT is continuing and reborn as an ongoing series of exceptional writing with Civil Coping Mechanisms. [insert \m/ METAL \m/ here] The series will push the boundaries of narrative with books that seek to reconstruct, reimagine & expand on existing narrative spaces. Not bound to genre or category, #RECURRENT books will be intuitive, instigative, innovative, sensitive, perceptive, heart-breaking, and honest.
More than anything, I’m interested in writing that gestures towards intimacy in different ways, in writing that isn’t afraid to reveal or retreat, and writing that makes us feel all the feelings.
#RECURRENT, a new series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, is excited to present 2 titles in 2016.
Gaijin by Jordan Okumura
(June 2016)
Deeply embedded in the novel Gaijin, by Jordan Okumura, is an unsettling nostalgia for family and for her Japanese culture, haunted by whispers and by abandoning, by illness and isolation, by silence and trauma. The novel attempts to simultaneously track a personal rupture and a family, through the painful and awkward reclamation of the self after sexual violence and the evocation of a patriarch who is half dreamed, half real.
Lidia Yuknavitch: And what is the measure of self inside grief? Jordan Okumura’s novel Gaijin is a body song. By weaving stories of loss and myth, Okumura brings an identity to life, half real, half imagined. I was mesmerized from start to finish.
Guest Edited by Laura Vena.
Blind Spot by Harold Abramowitz (forthcoming August 2016)
This brilliant, poetic novel weaves a new structure for narrative, forces the reader to consider the complex and profound structures hidden in a record of time, each observation of the utterly quotidian transforming into a lyrical evocation of essential significance. Each repetition is a surprise, and each consideration an impossible enigma. Narrated by a mysterious and clairvoyant consciousness, Blind Spot, is both blind and honest, isolated and compulsive, and achieves with such magnificent beauty a reconceptualization of seeing and reading that one might enter this book through its first lines and wish to never come out again.
TC Tolbert: It’s one thing to write a novel about trauma – to tell a coherent story, to create (and be comforted by, to whatever extent) a narrative arc of pain and loss. But it’s something else entirely to find oneself inside a series of imagistic and syntactical loops – a Venn diagram of partial thoughts (or dreams or memories) that become more certain and more troubling each time they refuse to relate or resolve. Harold Abramowitz’s Blind Spot is not about anything – about, from the Old English, ‘outside of.’ Instead, it’s a kind of prayer made out of attention (Simone Weil). Incantatory and somatechnic. I fucking love this book. Abramowitz writes the mind and body (in trauma, in everyday life) from the knotted and careful inside.