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distinguished office of echoes
Each poem was revealed, almost like a sculpture hidden inside stone, from the pages of three antique reference books...Her interventions involve collage and cutouts and erasure, though that latter term doesn't quite fit. Rather than blacking out lines, Olstein uses white paint to achieve a level of redaction that doesn't fully obscure the text, displaying her appreciation for palimpsest and texture. She may have had to destroy her source material in the process of crafting this astonishing work, but I prefer to think those books have been transubstantiated rather than desecrated. Olstein's care for the original reference books never falters, and she approaches her work with the reverence of a biologist--harvesting and dissecting a specimen to reveal new understandings of life.
—Benjamin Samuel, Bomb Magazine Editor's Pick
A riveting bookwork that re-enchants the meeting place of word and image while animating the intervals between the near and far. Both critical and playful in its methods, and inciting wonder from the pages of bygone volumes—on human history, the natural sciences—Distinguished Office of Echoes conjures a tactile intimacy from the past into an untimely present of haunting beauty.
—Roberto Tejada
A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts—their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions—casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.
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