The New [New] Corpse

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Art. Film. Ecology. THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE explores current representations of the body in which the human figure appears fragmented, distorted, or emphatically absent in a carefully curated selection of poetry, translation, essays, and exhibition documentation. With a mission statement provided by an artist's corporation, to a poem about corpses, and an essay about how Billy the Kid changed American mythology, these works emphasize the strange and residual power of material bodies, distorted and skewed through representation. It is produced in conjunction with a group exhibition of the same name.

Contributiors include Antibody Corporation, Rebecca Beachy, Érik Bullot, Judith Goldman, Julia Drescher, Every house has a door (Matthew Goulish & Lin Hixson), Christy LeMaster, Valeria Luiselli, Jesse Malmed, CJ Martin, Nathanaël, Caroline Picard, Martine Syms, John Tipton, Zoe Todd, and Fo Wilson.

"This stunning new artist's book from The Green Lantern Press engages with questions of the self and the body, through art, literature and performance. Caroline Picard's opening essay takes the image of bodies left on Mt Everest as a way into our sense (or refusal) of a collective body — composed, as it must be of new (new) corpses. Martine Syms' car is stolen, leading her toward an elegant examination of the how our stuff is not just part of who we are, it is who we are; Valeria Luiselli channels Benjamin (& other literary ghosts) for a 21st century bibliophile, ordering her own bookshelves in a meditation on what it means, for instance, to be a person who cuts a photo of Duras from the newspaper, and tucks it into a notebook as a souvenir. The book attests to the link between such otherwise banal human activity: that of losing and saving and losing again. Each contribution becomes a moment for art-making, a chance (as is climbing past the corpse named Green Boots) to mark our own finitude in the very moment of striving. Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson and Fo Wilson consider the relationship between the human and the non-human, the body in performance as the anti-Idea, or, indeed, encumbrance — here the new corpse becomes a way to break out of a crisis in representation. The emergent self is as unfixed as its body. THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE is a beautiful collection of text and image, and I'll return to it for inspiration again and again." —Suzanne Scanlon

"As curators in the most expansive sense, The Green Lantern Press relentlessly aims to refine the bump and tangle of interdisciplinary space, the constant bursts beyond what any given representation can hold. It is an incredibly generous gift to anyone open to receiving it, this space in which rigorous poetic logic prevails. Whether it's by troubling my assumed understandings of something, or drawing connections I hadn't previously recognized, the immersive engagement they consistently bring to their projects makes my mind quicken and my spirit deepen. Disciplines cohabit, objects and events, each thing remaining itself while simultaneously transformed by its proximity to others. And now this continuous rolling act of transformation has become an archive in The New [New] Corpse. Poems, essays, lists and images together aim to show us how to live in a world of objects and how to describe living in a world of objects, how the material and the spirit inform and warp each other." —Tim Kinsella

"THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE is more than a catalogue; it's a catalyst for both breaking down the work it represents and building it up again, with a new set of mouths and eyes and skin, allowing it to live a second life. I grabbed a firm hold on a bright thread running through these pieces: that we are composed of what we will ultimately leave behind and this gorgeous object is a perfect example of just that." —Jac Jemc