Quinn Latimer Considers the Scope of Immunity in Madeline Gins's Literary Ambition

Quinn Latimer reviews The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (Siglio Press, 2020), edited by Lucy Ives, for the newest 4Columns. "The questions of species continuation and the domestic architectonics in which such species as ours might best carry on are what Madeline Gins is, for various reasons, best known," offers Latimer. To continue:

An extraordinary experimental novelist and conceptual artist, poet and trained philosopher, Gins was also a speculative architect who, with her husband Shusaku Arakawa, attempted architectural environments that would stave off human death. Their Reversible Destiny project includes Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) (2008), a home in East Hampton, New York, with vivid walls and wavelike floors. “This is a means to strengthen the immune system,” Gins notes sharply, in a documentary. “It has to do with not being so damn sure of yourself . . . you’re obliged to watch your balance, carefully.”

Watching one’s balance, carefully, is also what she obliges of her reader. The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, a startling collection of essays, novels, artist books, and poems, edited by Lucy Ives, makes clear that Gins didn’t go for rote lyrical (or anti-lyrical) celebrations of language or comforting social narratives, but had more pressing goals. Employing a language equal parts phenomenology and microbiology, domestic-architectural intimacy and linguistic voracity, Gins’s literary ambition was nothing short of immunity.

Find the full review at 4Columns.