Isle of the Signatories

Sophisticated wordplay, bold textual logic, and striking graphic innovation.

In her latest collection, Marjorie Welish invents a world of public inscriptions. From graffiti to scholarly dedication and from historical placards to words etched in granite, she employs a variety of fonts to explore the dangers of rhetoric, the mysteries of coded language, the enigmas of form, the powerful gift of dedication, and the strange sense and substance of both new and dying literary conventions.

Publication date: April 1, 2008

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 128 pages

ISBN: 9781566892124

Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, Word Group, Isle of the Signatories, In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy, and So What So That (Winter 2016), all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published in the book Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists’ book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena which was the subject of a special exhibition at Denison University Museum, Granville, Ohio; the book is in permanent collections, including that of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent art exhibitions have occurred at Emanuel von Baeyer Cabinet, London, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, England, and ART-3, Brooklyn. Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She is now Madelon Leventhal Rand Chair in Literature at Brooklyn College.

“Welish’s poems do for language what great abstract paintings do for paint.”

—No: A Journal of the Arts

“This book could be Welish’s breakthrough, offering her clearest, most discursive works, proximate in their edgy attentions not only to art-world thinkers but to Anne Carson.”

—Publishers Weekly

“These poems critique themselves, they critique the contexts of their subjects—walls, signs, flyers, graffiti—and, most notably, play freely with ideas, language, and, of course, representation.”

—The Austin Chronicle

“I suspect that the seamless and efficient arrangement of things is directly related to the fact that Welish is also a prominent painter; she’s got an eye for placement and a clearly present sense of theory. . . . The effect is like humming to yourself in the presence of a great and soothing din.”

—Bookslut