&NOW Books (imprint of Lake Forest College Press)

Poetry collection

Jessica Savitz's poems are imbued with a strange, skeptical mysticism, in which a visionary impulse is interrupted, again and again, by anxious self-reflection. The mute orders are given voice, as Whitman directed, "without check with original energy," while emblems of over-refinement are returned to the realm of the organic: "Speech comes out fur-lined." Savitz's buoyant, melancholy, ungainly voice, with echoes of folklore, medieval romance, Spanish surrealism, Delta blues, Black Mountain poetics, and teh motley metaphysics of contemporary life, is a marvel of invention. Savitz is a genre unto herself.

Traces of many books masque themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson's "Galerie de Difformite." With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality--all with a wry sense of self-representational humor. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the "Galerie" is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and "choose your own adventure." This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essay-as-art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium.