| Amblyopia | ||
| by Jena Osman | ||
| 48 pages | ISBN 0-939691-09-4 | $8.00 |
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"Amblyopia is an invitation to a new architecture, where spaces are
construed with artifacts of the mind--favorite haunts, obscure discoveries,
longings, persons and objects--as well as vital responses to the habitat it
creates. Each gesture leaves a trace representing a kind of revolution or
paragraph on a relatively fragile topic. The writing is precise and
lush. That we get to follow Jena Osman into her theatre of invention is an
exhilirating pleasure of the first order."
"Amblyopia is a thoughtful and compelling meditation on object
relations. 'The eye follows the lines and comes to its own conclusions away
from the object.' Under the rubric of impaired vision, the physical eye that
receives images prefigures the cognitive I that construes the images it
perceives. 'Portraiture is the next task, a label for each one.' Yet if
identity is wanton in its reflexivity, it is also wanting, i.e. refractive, in
its apprehension of the real. 'The object perhaps a result of a glimmer, an
attraction to things that shine or reflect, though at every turn we find the
literally descriptive valences of our perceptions mediated by their stark
(un)representability. In light of which, it is with admirable calm and care
that these poems propose 'a knowledge beyond familiarity' -- from which we
'must learn to desire what is outside [our] desire.'"
"Amblyopia continually makes the periphery, as if that were the edge of
the object, at which something/ onself is seen. The faculty of perception is
itself time, as the shape in/ or the writing; and in that sense it is an object
observing itself. Osman says an action can't be remembered that is out of
control; yet the coherence which is 'given' experience, or lack of coherence,
is lighted or observed 'from the inside': 'What is inside after having stayed
inside for this length. Light brings memory out from the inside.'"