A Clark Faculty Series Event
Presented by
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, MFA
Associate Professor of Practice in English
Clark University
In this book launch, poet Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez reads from their chapbook A/An. Using 17th century court records of the Salem Witch Trials as a sounding board, A/An mines the archives to uncover the power and violence residing within the language of the legal system. Through a series of poems modeled after examinations of particular witches, Gutmann-Gonzalez acts as a medium for these voices from the past. In A/An, poetry and archive wrestle, shattering these legal documents that act as gravestones and spilling the voices caught therein.
Admission is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Guests are encouraged to arrive at 11:45 a.m. for refreshments.
This event is sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of English at Clark University.
About the Speaker
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is a Chilean poet and novelist working at the intersections of text, image, archive, and translation. They are the author of La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas) and A/An (End of the Line Press). Their work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Lambda Literary, The Center for Book Arts, TAKT Residency in Berlin, The Frost Place, Studios at MASS MoCA, the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities, and MacDowell. They teach creative writing at Clark University.
About the Book
Using 17th-century court records of the Salem Witch Trials as a sounding board, A/An mines the archives to uncover the power and violence residing within the language of the legal system. As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what was aberrant. Rather than regarding the witch hunts as historical curiosity or speculating to fill the gaps, A/An considers the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance. In these poems, English becomes foreign to itself, having distorted through time and slipped through the sieve of law, through the inevitable erasures of matter and the ideological erasures of the archive: the gaps marked “[illegible due to fold in paper],” and the silences that remain unmarked. In a poetics of the “[…]”, A/An engages with textual gaps as lacunae. In A/An, poetry and archive wrestle, shattering these legal documents that act as gravestones and spilling the voices caught therein.
