A dated “poemlogue,” Lands of Yield transcribes Tokyo’s fantastic sensorium via rigid syllabics and mutating form. In dialogue with Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Bernadette Mayer’s early durational works, and various literary diaries, the text also forays into other geographies and temporalities. “What use are these measured clues?” Anderson asks. What’s worth putting down, when the documentation is too voluminous to match up to memory? “Did I mention the mottled windows?” Who is the document’s intended recipient? “What are you reading now?” “Did I ask it in a dream?” “What would the clear material be?”
Of the book, Rob McLennan writes, “Anderson’s ‘poemlogue’ exists exactly as it describes, poem-ing her way through a travel that doesn’t exist as straight travelogue; a journal that doesn’t exist as a straight journal. For Anderson, the poem is the thing, allowing the lyric to propel the movement around and through information gathered, utilized and processed... This is a hefty and impressive volume, and one that exists as a worthy travel non-travel exploration of self and of skin and of the intimately immediate, whether home or abroad.”
You can read work from Lands of Yield online in: Map Literary, Moss Trill, Posit, BORT Quarterly, Open Letters Monthly, DREGINALD, NOÖ Journal (one, two), Ghostwriters of Delphi, Leveler, and Masque & Spectacle.
And offline in: MAKE Magazine and eccolinguistics.
Order the book from SPD.
Book design by Alban Fischer.