A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe

What occasions assembling a new body? Is language even sufficient for this task or does it always demonstrate its own body-forming shortcomings? So much literature from marginalized spaces has contended with these question. In A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe poet and multimedia artist D. Allen finds their voice among erasures from dictionary definitions lyrical polyphony the urgency of second person and the tug-of-wars between rural and urban spaces for people with disabilities to ritualize gestures of survival in sites arrowed with pain destruction surveillance and control. Allen offers us their own visual productions--with echoes of Joseph Cornells boxes--and assembles centos on the page to find the knife in all of us and to ask what its there to do. To inhabit a body with secrets welded inside every cell is to live in a place without learning its landscape they write evoking how living with disability can be a constant process of (re)orientation (re)acquaintanceship and (re)fermentation. What does the disabled body want today that it couldnt foresee wanting last week? Is the disabled body the impetus for a new metaphysical world? As Allen has sewn this collection I too have lived with these poems. Ive watched them become what you necessary reader hold before you. I hope they offer you the same resoluteness theyve offered me. --Roy G. Guzmán poet and author of Restored Mural for OrlandoA Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is one of the most necessary books Ive ever encountered. The speakers experience of disability--burning light love and everything else--covers the body like a new skin. The breathtaking visual elements scaffolding the work are its bones and with each new line we are reminded: Bless these sensations more tenacious than pain. --Nicole Oquendo multimodal writer and visual artistA Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is a hybrid collection of lyric essays poems dictionary erasures and images that emerged out of the poets diagnosis in their mid-twenties with a connective tissue disorder. Slipping in and out of intimate interiors open fields city sidewalks flowering gardens construction sites doctors offices and fluctuating shorelines the speaker gathers answers to the question: What holds us together when the body falls apart? Imperfect solutions arrive in the form of queer intimacy and kinship long-term relationships with landscapes collections of strange and familiar objects and language itself. A Bony Framework for the Tangible Universe is constantly breaking and and putting itself together in a messy cycle of adaptation and resistance. Part of the KIN(D)* TEXTS & PROJECTS seriesExcerpts appear at District Lit and Rogue Agent Journal: https: //districtlit.com/2017/06/28/d-allen/ http: //www.rogueagentjournal.com/issue16/