Hyperallergic Reviews Afton Wilky's Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea

If you're wondering what to start reading this fall, Hyperallergic has some great pointers, including a shout out to Afton Wilky's debut collection published by flim forum press called Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea. Just by the sound of the book's title, we're tempted to agree.

To immediately grasp the innovative nature of Afton Wilky’s debut volume Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea and to begin to appreciate its exploration of language’s materialities and its playful stretching of the conventions of the codex form, one need only consider its front cover. Even on the outside, we begin, it seems, in medias res: in place of where one might expect bibliographic information — for example, the book’s title, the author’s name — one already finds a piece of the poetic text extrojected into the paratext or, from a different perspective, a visually compelling textual fragment that nicely doubles as cover art. This is a book that one would have no trouble judging by its cover as the cover is already the beginning (if one can even speak of a beginning) of the book. The strategy of making the work’s framing apparatus a part of the work itself — as if the aesthetics of the work were encroaching upon the threshold between art and non-art — was a familiar one to the modernists; we can think of T. S. Eliot’s curious notes to The Waste Land or Constantin Brancusi’s pedestals, which trouble the distinction between sculpture and base, or William Carlos Williams’ and Marianne Moore’s practice of making a poem’s title double as the poem’s first line. Wilky is actively extending this tradition as she immediately beseeches the reader from the front cover to “read the wight thought.” There is a noticeable homophonic play with the word “white” (Wilky, after all, makes expert use of white space in the book), but if we interpret “wight” to mean “moving briskly or rapidly; active, agile, nimble, quick; swift, fleet” (OED), we are well prepared to follow a flow of thinking-through-language that always — and tantalizingly — seems to slip out of view. Indeed, in order to follow the string of alliterative sibilants (“seams seize seas seethes sembles . . .”) which races across the cover we would need to read across the edge of the cover and continue onto the reverse side: “seek in saysaw stance astir astir.” Wilky’s compound “saysaw” suggests that the process of reading Clarity is a sort of seeking which requires being attuned to both saying and seeing, a seesawing between sound and vision with one’s sensorium astir. [...]

Continue to read more at Hyperallergic.