Water, water, every where: Harmony Holiday's A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father Reviewed

At The Rumpus, Kent Shaw takes a look into Harmony Holiday's latest dual book A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father and finds a poetics of water flowing: "Look at a river, read a poem about a river, feel the river while the river’s current guides the poem, impels the poem, insists the poem. And this would be one version of the poetics to water that appears in Harmony Holiday’s dual book, A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father." Before you embark, Shaw recommends beginning with Go Find Your Father, which not only gives the reader context for A Famous Blues "(i.e. who is this Jimmie Holiday in relation to the speaker, how does she feel about him, how does she feel about the music and the music industry’s position towards him)" but also:

[...] because the access to the daughter’s voice is so absolute and entire in Go Find Your Father that any ambiguity in A Famous Blues is understood as necessary and a poetically inevitable sorting through of the speaker’s relationship with her father. Put another way, difficulty offers its own type of access.

Shaw goes on to think of Holiday's book in relationship to Jenny Boully's The Body

[...] where Bouilly is absence with the hint of a broader substance playing out in that absence, and Holiday is substance playing out and on and in and alongside and over but not done over until maybe the jazz note would dictate, go ahead do it over. Then Holiday doesn’t necessarily do it over, but just plays it a little bit longer before she drops all that substance on top of the other substance. Maybe I’ve always wanted to envision the kind of text that would be present in The Body, and Holiday’s style and poetics feels like that overflow that would necessitate Bouilly’s footnotes. And in Holiday’s dual book, it feels as though the body of circumstance and emotional complexity is already footnoted, whether it’s through the appropriated texts or her direct reference to black artists.

There's more to be enlightened by over at The Rumpus.