Bookforum Revels in Moyra Davey's Preoccupied Essay Collection, Index Cards

Emily LaBarge reviews artist and writer Moyra Davey's new collection of essays, Index Cards (New Directions), for Bookforum. LaBarge frames Davey's exploratory work well: "The telegraphic and carefully choreographed fragment is core to Davey’s work, which combines partial narratives, diary entries, wide-ranging quotations, invocations of literary lives, vivid splinters of recalled images and emotions, meditations on art—and, and, and . . . " More:

The essay has always been a processual form, hybrid and capacious: nonfiction that takes liberties and shows, as William Gass wrote, “the mind in the marvels and miseries of its making.” In Davey’s hands, it is at its best, reckoning with subjects as varied as motherhood, psychoanalysis, chance, political revolution, memory, addiction, desire, regret, and the ethics of photographic representation. She’s especially powerful on the virtues and vices of labor: What it means to live to work, when “work” is art that sustains, even as it troubles or perplexes, when “work” cannot be done because the body ails and fails. The essays in Index Cards are a “collision of sensibilities,” as Davey writes in “Burn the Diaries”—a sort of paean to Jean Genet. (Another of Davey’s familiars, Genet’s prose studs the piece and seeps into others in the book.) Here, writing—with all its compulsions—is a mode of thinking in itself: a kind of striving, intimate and tangled, as emotional as it is intellectual. Davey makes sense of her preoccupations as they unfold in real time.

Sei Shōnagon, the first queen of the fragment, wrote in The Pillow Book of “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster,” compiling a list of just such, each item a thrill, a reference also invoked in Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, yet another of Davey’s kindred spirits.… 

Read on at Bookforum.