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from Between Grammars
A Prologue in Four Volumes –
Volume : Body
The book rearranges itself in your life. To have it. A dwelling. That one is at once within and without.
Language tides the skinline. Soon a rib cage, a spinal column, a skull. An open mouth, a full set of teeth. Fusible suddenly to a word.
Pass through it so that you might put it. Of cell and sound. A slick causeway. The page, a wet field. A place to pass our mouths irregular as the course.
Volume : Letter
The first letter sent every moving thing.
A letter cuts threshes and cleans twice into a third leaning. It is the sentence into another into an other. Reduced then to vowels and aspirates. Similar to light’s refraction through water. The tendency to incline syllables and then to wager the words I and yes. One might say, without saying, to the other in the third space of the letter, reduce me to ‘o,’ and then fill me back up again.
Volume : Page
Flesh had an alphabet. To keep them. Appearing in space through the speaking. The wet membrane, syllables sound. A scene splayed. A body opened. And it was so. Because you sense it. Say it. A present tense. A trellis of water. A wet column of words to walk through.
Volume : Book
Begin again. And there. And there was. Let it. Let the. Let there. Be diffused. Unblotted through the body. So exposed. A piece of her. A letter, liable. On paper or on language. Flooded, skinned buoyant. Dust and water, sounds. And the waters swelled. Swarmed. Strained.
Because a body loosens itself across an alphabet. The margins malleable because they are washed. Through the sounding.
Where the writer is submerged. She surfaces to speak. Waiting for her reader. The reader’s arms as they enter. Soaked up to the elbows. Move sound. Lisps this body to that. The writer is waiting. Flooded by the book. She floods the book in return. Watershed, she floats below the lip. And the little words are with her in the dark.
Danielle Vogel is a book artist and the author of Narrative & Nest and lit. Her book arts work has most recently been exhibited at Rhode Island’s the AS220 Project Space, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Denver’s Abecedarian Gallery. Her written texts have most recently appeared in The Feminist Wire, The Volta, and Tarpaulin Sky. Through both her written work and book artifacts, she investigates the symbiotic bonds between a writer, language, and her readers—how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, can be a site of radical transformation.