CELL, Amanda Hurtado.
MonoD Books 2016.
CELL, in homage to Robert Grenier’s Sentences, is a deck of hand cut 5×8 cards encased in a lovingly crafted clam-shell box bound in book cloth. It was printed on Risograph @ jikji studios in Bothell, WA in a very limited edition.
The minimalist poems of CELL were inspired by Lina Persson’s 2016 show at INCA, Seattle WA, titled “Animated Ecologies,” in addition to Karen Barad’s, “What is the Measure of Nothingness?”; Samuel Beckett’s “Stories and Texts for Nothing”; and Francis Ponge’s “La Parte Pris de Choses.”
Unsequenced but not empty, minimal and yet stacked thick with relation, and insisting that “it matters how something is explored,” CELL nests itself in itself in a beautiful box as if already archived. Its name evokes a teeming mirco-world of linguistic and semi-semantic relations: confined spaces, single celled organisms, financial homophones, emergent complexity, parts and wholes, the prison of the grid, and, perhaps more than any of these, the poetic space where these points on a cast net collect into pebbles of language that slip through even our finest meshed drags.
Amanda Hurtado is the author of S ACE P (editions eclipse, 2014; timglaset, 2019 (excerpt); bloc, Moth Iversen (stolen & escaped, 2015/2021); and more. Hurtado is a special guest on episode 4 of Buried Text where we discuss NH Pritchard’s The Matrix (recently re-issued by Ugly Duckling Presse) and a version of Craig Dworkin’s essay on Pritchard from Radium of the World, University of Chicago, 2020).