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Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

Translator’s Note Death on Rua Augusta is a book I knew I would translate before I had even finished reading it What most attracted me to the text was my desire to make sense of it, to understand it better, and that allowed me to place personal fulfilment far before any hopes of publication While such a close reading of the text did increase my understanding, it also left me puzzled further: Tedi López Mills so relentlessly explores the boundaries of consciousness – be it Gordon’s, the poem’s, or our own – that the boundaries themselves begin to blur At some points in the translation process, I felt very much that I belonged in Gordon’s tormented world, punctuated by the small satisfactions we had each scrawled in our respective notebooks Death on Rua Augusta is a funambulatory feat; as the poem barrels onwards, it is easy to miss some of its more subtle lyric moments In translation I found myself engaging in that same balancing act: attempting to maintain the drive towards Gordon’s ultimate destiny without losing the book’s poetry, especially its sonic patterning, and doing justice to those lyrical sections without allowing the narrative pace to falter On first reading, I recommend the reader not insist on making sense of the world of Death on Rua Augusta, but rather relish the experience of inhabiting it, enjoy riding the waves of its mania and paranoia, get lost in its relentless onslaught of voices —DS   *** I On the first morning of his new life Mr Gordon (blessèd Mr Gordon) made drawings for his neighbours’ grandchildren & tilled the garden for his wife, Donna: look what I planted today —he told her— heliotropes & roses & geraniums for you, mud for me, words & worms for you, a pebble or what do I have here? glass! a drop of blood, Donna, my blood for you So Mr Gordon played in his yard in the suburbs of Fullerton, California, he played & then he cried, sprawled on the earth with his drop of blood, his

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

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Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

fiction

April 2015

Heavy

Chris Newlove Horton

fiction

April 2015

It is a two lane road somewhere in North America. The car is pulled onto the shoulder with the...

feature

July 2013

Love Dog

Masha Tupitsyn

feature

July 2013

11 22 2011 – LOVE DOG     For months Hamlet has been floating around. Its book covers popping...

 

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