Stephanie Strickland

V: Wavetercets / Losing l'Una Stephanie Strickland

Poetry. Strickland's lyric poetry reads the entire gamut of knowledge--'from sails to satellites' and from shadows and spectres to spectral analysis--through the figure of Simone Weil, for whom knowledge of the spirit was to be attained by lived proof. Imagine this, and you will appreciate how a lyric poetry of such ethereal embodiment can be made to scintillate through hypertext, linked to lines of flight and seeming fantasy. Yet the really good news is that Strickland puts the lyric poem to the test as if, quite as much as music, it were the very instrumentality of a quickening mind.--Marjorie Welish

In V the poetics of Wittgenstein and Weil--quotidian, notational, mathematical, emotional--are revisited and re-formed. They are, in a word, saved. This is a truly modern book, a guide to the noetic spheres where we are obliged by history, science and heart to go. It is a thrilling work that is above all useful.--Fanny Howe

Stephanie Strickland is one of a handful of outstanding writers working to forge poetic forms at the intersection of technological innovation and the tradition of experimental writing. V is a networked artifact. As a double work, the book contrasts its own internal forms, its winged halves converging on a pivot / hinge from which it leaps toward the constellations of its Web extension. Product of an intellectual imagination similar to Simone Weil's, this poem is radical in integrating new technology, not as a novelty or special effect, but as a way of thinking.--Johanna Drucker

Stephanie Strickland's V is an experimental, philosophical poem, in part a mystical meditation on mathematics, in part a love poem to non-existence. Strickland uses a transgressive style of sentence and syntax and numbering to cross epistemological boundaries and to question worship of the ideal, while offering new beauty in its stead.--Brenda Hillman