grid lick 3-4

Dad: An off-white background spotted with very light grey strokes, some appearing to be fingerprints. At the center of the image, demanding the most attention, lies a disembodied head of a person who appears to be forced into a solid object, possibly a wall or the ground. The person’s skin is painted a golden brown color in thick, shorter brush strokes. A series of white and grey lines form angles throughout the person’s face to outline eyebrows, eyes, a nose, and teeth. The person’s eyes are painted with black and white colors, with one eye seemingly directed towards the wall / ground and the other looking into a direction beyond the painting. A sharp burst of bright pink lines the person’s lower set of teeth to demarcate a mouth. To the right of the person, three broad lines emerge from the edge of the painting and push into the person’s face. The top two lines are painted the same golden brown color, with the first including the faintest smattering of golden yellow. The second line is a combination of golden yellow and golden brown, with a bright pink underlying the bottom of the line. Finally, the third line is composed of golden yellow and bright pink. The trio of lines seem to represent a kind of force that is aggressively pushing down against the face, keeping them still and unable to release themselves from their position against the wall / ground.

4: 3: a block of text, with arrows and connections between them. The text fragments read: Self improvement strategies for the rich and powerful thighs feminized toxic woman hip hip hooraying. subby altern abuse cycles celebrating loss celebration as losing praise kink bedroom context aging transgender d-entity hooked into traumatized be armored by free stress response dissolution of self death wish or change wish androgeny queer language halts the you elegiac (!) towards apocalypse wake up morning tasks words / water / trick / drink drink water trick words half hovering edit this to-do lists enactments wake or wake: occult (?) patterning? mottled? verticality

grid lick

ava hofmann and Ava Hofmann

Poems in grids. Each box of the grid is its own unit of verse.

I invite you to read the grid non-hierarchically. Each unit can be read in any order. Move around the grid vertically up/down, horizontally left/right. Read diagonally, wrap around edges, teleport from unit to unit. Or not.

I have also supplied a second-order layer of information which seeks to aid and hinder interpretation of the work with an “oppositional gloss”—arrows and red text. This reflexive polyvocality is a tendency throughout the entirety of my poetic project. This second voice is not an explanation of the work—it is a second voice which is open to being read with, against, or beside its language and pathways through the first deposition of information.

Thank you for reading.

Image Descriptions

“grid lick 3-4”: 3: a block of text, with arrows and connections between them.

The text fragments read: some of my arrows are wrong in set / in the: in interiority out / in echoes distance or duration door inset in the door blah blah blah length of string sing sting ring Sonic indeterminacies. between lexical sexual bloodstream my defunding finacialization of selfhood linguistic passageways signs without meaning – value repeat in threes, lengthen themselves value and bleeding the blank blank lists diagram blanked out bankrupture “listing as desire” dysphorias and digestion randomized life actually live i will “in” digestion scrambled i remind i-self and/and: dome-ized (?)

4: a block of text, with arrows and connections between them.

The text fragments read: Self improvement strategies for the rich and powerful thighs feminized toxic woman hip hip hooraying. subby altern abuse cycles celebrating loss celebration as losing praise kink bedroom context aging transgender d-entity hooked into traumatized be armored by free stress response dissolution of self death wish or change wish androgeny queer language halts the you elegiac (!) towards apocalypse wake up morning tasks words / water / trick / drink drink water trick words half hovering edit this to-do lists enactments wake or wake: occult (?) patterning? mottled? verticality

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