No Gender: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards
Edited by E. Tracy Grinnell, erica kaufman, Julian Talamantez Brolaski
$18.00
kari’s authorial “signature” undoes the authorial body in favor of a visible obfuscation—strikethru: kari never just signed, but rather crossed out hir name and wrote “NO GENDER.” The erasure—well no, the palimpsestic remaking of the name into a symbol for the dismantling of enforced gender codes is a profound and provocative gesture—the name is still visible behind the NO GENDER, as if behind bars… kari’s genius moved others to their own words, art, action—following a mandate of reclaiming the very words we speak and write—writing ourselves, our other(ed) bodies, into a foundational post-gender post-genre state. This book is the start of what hopefully will be a much longer conversation.
— from the introduction by Julian T. Brolaski & erica kaufman
Venn Diagram Productions is the collaborative intersection between Belladonna* and Litmus Press. This imprint actualizes our mutual commitment to publishing innovative, cross-genre, multicultural, feminist and queer work by writers and artists working beyond and between borders.
Contributors include: Fran Blau, Kevin Killian, CAConrad, Yedda Morrison, Leslie Scalapino, erica kaufman, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Julian T. Brolaski, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Reed Bye, Lisa Jarnot, Sherman Souther, Chris Martin, Ellen Redbird, Mark Brasuell, Donna de la Perriere, Bill Marsh, Wendy Kramer, Marcus Civin, Joan MacDonald, Rachel Levitsky, E. Tracy Grinnell, Joseph Lease, Eileen Myles, Eleni Stecopoulos, Cara Benson, Anne Waldman, Michael Smoler, and Rob Halpern.
E. Tracy Grinnell
erica kaufman
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Praise for No Gender
I’m NOT just saying this because I’m in this book, it’s marvelous! Poems, essays on kari and gender and on teaching kari, close readings of kari’s work: this is a study of resistance to cultural dictates, a real live struggling, wriggling atmosphere takes shape while you read this history we cannot live without!
— CA Conrad
stunning book, intimate yet unsentimentally so: intimately informed & a also primer for anyone interested in edwards’ work—activism AND poetry-art (how even to separate these things)—”there is an autopsy mortgage on demarcations,” as edwards writes in iduna.
— David Woloch
kari edwards, according to many who wrote about hir in NO GENDER, was a being committed to engaging deeply with hir environment and other people… NO GENDER [elaborates] on many of kari’s struggles, but also how kari’s empathy inspired and helped its authors.
— Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects
The cultural “I” that I’m working with here is the book itself—the book becomes a sort of exploration of my cultural “I” through fiction, a way of learning to understand myself through their/my language that constructs me… I think naming things can be a tool for both liberation and oppression. So for me language becomes a tool that can be used and then destroyed or reused again in a different way.
— kari edwards, Rain Taxi