A Complex Sentence

In A Complex Sentence, Marjorie Welish builds immersive intertextual environments as she questions the canon of modernist poetry and the ways we talk about poetics.

In her sixth collection with Coffee House, Welish continues to explore rhetorical practices such as diagramming, inscription, and quotation, to call our attention to literary acts—from finding the right desk to getting lost at logic gates—yet all the while following the mental circuitry of dismantling and re-assembling a poetic language. Expertly manipulating the space of the page, her poems dissolve the boundaries between visual art and the written word. With her signature precision, musicality, and structural rigor, Welish turns the lyric poem into a critical instrument with which to think about the writer’s calling, through the specifics of language and literature.

Publication date: May 11, 2021

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 128 pages 

ISBN: 9781566896085

This book is made possible through fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge.

For her arts and critical practice, Marjorie Welish has received a Fulbright Senior Scholarship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. Papers delivered on her arts practices at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania are compiled in Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish. Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 is a book of her art criticism. A Work, and . . ., in which she is interviewed by Lilly Wei, is the most extensive catalogue of her art.

“There is a clarity in the book’s musicality and a disruption of clarity in its sensitive juxtapositions. This is Welish at her best and most powerful moments, at moments of loss and gain, at moments of assuredness and in fleets of frailty.”

—Allen Fisher

“Welish’s sentences are complex, grammatically and narratively; they break the spine, as it were, of the book’s monumentality. In the interstices of writing and saying lies the supplement to meaning, what we read between the lines or what the lines—center margined or flush left—arrange as a new structure of understanding. This is a wild and compelling book.”

—Michael Davidson

“Displacing semantics with syntactics, foregrounding the syntagmatic over the paradigmatic, Welish reminds her readers of the structural, formal, and, above all, cultural values that constrain all meaning-making, artistic or not. For these reasons and more, the title of this book must be read simultaneously as a dialectics—adjective-noun, adjective-verb, noun-verb—without resolution, three dyads orbiting one another in the dance of an intellect with few peers.”

—Tyrone Williams