In the Futurity Lounge

Welish fuses poetry with visual art and architecture.

In her new collection, Marjorie Welish presents two books in one. “In the Futurity Lounge” may be read as that de-centered laboratory of the modern futurity lounge where experimental works are in a constant state of being constructed. Her poems are written across, through, and at the expense of urban sites, themselves part architecture, part language, including Roebling’s Aqueduct, Wright’s Fallingwater, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line, and Rem Koolhaas’s student center at Illinois Tech. “Asylum for Indeterminacy” is an extended zone of research devoted to translation constructed freely from a few given words from prior translations. Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” is the provocation.

Publication date: April 30, 2012

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 112 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.

“In the Futurity Lounge/Asylum for Indeterminacy is an experimental double-header. . . . It’s a work to be grasped in the reading—and rereading.” 

—Library Journal

“What distinguishes the book as poetry is its ability to engage readers in the process of construction that creates a text in time, as much as ‘textual strategy’ constructs a building in space.” 

—Rain Taxi

“A showcase for a preponderance of linguistic flair. . . . [Welish's] endlessly inflected reflections are demanding but sustained. This ‘wounded language’ is branded by ascription, disinterred by sun.”

—The Brooklyn Rail

“[Marjorie Welish’s work] has both sensuality and really dazzling conceptual rigor.” 

—Culture Industry

“LangPo at its most deliciously unrepentant.” 

—Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

“In the Futurity Lounge is an archaeological dig into modernism’s ruins to find our present moment anticipated as figure, speech act, performance.” 

—Michael Davidson

“Finished and finely wrung, this book is a linguistic experiment in active collaboration with matter—the dense data itself.”

—David Shapiro

“The studio, the period, the complete sentence, the anthology, the retrospective, the commemorative, the completed works, etc. are here systematically deconstructed under the ceaseless movement of temporality.” 

—Tyrone Williams

“Marjorie Welish stages an elastic series of radical encounters. Sometimes paratactic, sometimes not, her virtuosic streaming image clusters and recursive internal rhyme—‘e voc a tive’—will blow you away.” 

—Norma Cole