New Exercises Limited Edition Box Set

By Franck André Jamme, Translated by Charles Borkhuis

• Description
• Reviews

• Limited edition box set of broadsides from New Exercises, a collection of text works by French poet and visual artist Franck André Jamme, translated by Charles Borkhuis. The box set consists of twelve silk-screened broadsides on mirricard paper, based on originals hand-lettered by Jamme, and printed by Portland, Oregon-based silkscreen artists, Seizure Palace. The box is printed with a Navajo image selected by Jamme.

• Even as Jamme’s neat blocks, steles, and squares suggest the permanence of letters on stone, they tell us, in modernist style, to make ourselves new -- to rearrange our ideas, to regard all experience as impermanent, all patterns as partly imposed.
  Stephen Burt, Rain Taxi, Fall 2009
  
  The process of reading [New Exercises] seems as important (if not more so) that the wisdom of the aphorisms. They play against the urge of the eye to progress, causing me to arrive at words in unexpected ways. The reading of this books works as part puzzle, part poem, part wish. It makes me wonder how I would have reacted to Stein’s syntax if I’d read it first in the subway rather than in a textbook, or Williams’ lines without having them poorly interpreted by a high school teacher (sorry Mr. Slaughter).
  Mathias Svalina, Yes, Starlings! Yes!
  
  I respond to [New Exercises] the way I picture Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths communing deeply with a Chinese character, pulling the various ideogrammatic particulars (man, tree, fire) out in order to suss out a synthesis, registering progress with a satisfying asemantical grunt. I like how slow it makes the world. I like the waiting, the revel of delay reveal’d. (A lovely line of apparent instruction, laconic, prefaces the selection: “Not too fast.”)  John Latta, Isola di Rifuti