Jill Maji's Labor (Nightboat, 2012)

Jill Magi describes her book LABOR (Nightboat, 2012) as "A fiction ... / An installation / A handmade employee handbook." But, of course, it's also A Poetry. Read more about LABOR, and see more images of the author's text and text-work on Magi's site, here.

Find excerpted poems from LABOR at jubilat, here; and at The Brooklyn Rail, here. Read reviews at CSU's Center for Literary Publishing, here; at Tupelo Quarterly, here; and at Drunken Boat, here.

In an interview with Andy Fitch, Magi explains how, when drawing from source texts, such as those she found at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (a public archive at NYU's Bobst Library), "[T]he words are openings into, portals into something generative, a story about to come." 

still from LABOR: Finding Guide

LABOR is a physical, not merely intellectual work; Magi reminds us, "I actually made boxes, lined them with fake fur, and put documents in them while I was writing LABOR."
 
Even more: view Magi's LABOR: Finding Guide on YouTube; read her curated chapbook Labor Poetic Labor! (Essay Press), online here; and, be sure to check out Magi's series on Textile Poetics at Jacket2.

Emmalea Russo's "Stanza V," from Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation (pub. 1956) featured in her interview with the Textile Arts Center. Russo's entire project, they (GAUSS PDF, 2014), is viewable online here.

Find more of Russo's work, poetry preoccupied with thread and textile, including her deconstruction and reconstruction of Anne Carson's Nox, and her installation Rooms, from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, online.

 

from Ania Wawrzkowicz's series Ambiguous Documents (2012?). More images (but very little information) here, here, here, and here.

Emily Dickinson's Poems (Little, Brown 1901). More here.

1) Janet Holmes THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman, 2009), an erasure of Dickinson's Civil War poems, here. More pages here, Holmes discusses her project here, Ron Silliman discusses it here, and p. 98 is below:




2) Kiki Smith's Emily Dickinson Sampler (Arion Press, 2007) -- 200 of Dickinson's poems with prints by Smith. More here and here.

3) from Jen Bervin's The Dickinson Fascicles (2004-2006?). More here. Published as The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books 2010), here.

4) Roni Horn's When Dickinson Shut her Eyes--For Felix; No. 352 (1993), here. More here, here, and here.

5) Paul Legault's English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems (McSweeney's, 2012). Legault explains here, "The Dickinson translations are a joke that became serious—or at least became an extended joke that wasn’t over until I “translated” all 1789 of them into basic English." Watch the video here.

 6) See also Laura Wetherington's chapbook Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press 2011).

from Katrina Rodabaugh's Dresses/Objects project (2007-2010), an art installation based on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. As part of the project, she explains, "I printed poems from Gertrude Stein’s book, Tender Buttons, on to recycled fabric with a letterpress," here. An image of the whole dress here. Some fascinating discussion--with more pictures--here.

Jody Alexander's Exposed Spines (2010), here. Alexander's version of The Handmaid's Tale here, more work here, and her website here.

Lisa Kokin's "Selections from Mein Kampf" (2000), in How2, here.

And "I Love only What I Least Know" (1999). Her website, here. More here, here, and here.

p. 22 from Jen Bervin's Nets (2004)


and from Bervin's The Desert (2008). This blue thread is pretty wonderful--I like just about everything about it. But I'm somehow more interested in a digital image of an original handsewn page than in a limited-edition machine-sewn artist book. Hmm. The latter was once available here.

Lauren DiCioccio's Madame Bovary (2010). Click over to her website to see more of DiCioccio's wonderful sewn & altered books.