Dahlia's Iris

by Scalapino, Leslie

• ISBN13: 9781573661119
• ISBN10: 1573661112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Fc2/Black Ice Books

Summary

Detectives are investigating the death of Dahlia Winter's husband and also looking into the mysterious deaths of young boys who are imported for labor in a future-time San Francisco. Citing the plots ofInvasion of the Body Snatchers,Terminator 2, andBlade Runneras proof that our sense of inner and outer is tied to rebellion and slavery, the novel appears at first to be a detail of these films all at once, like a colonization of them from the inside. But almost immediately the plot assumes its own life. Based on a conception of the Tibetan written form called Secret Autobiography--which is not the chronological events or actions of a life, but an individual's seeing outside any frames--the novel makes a time-space in which sensation, actions, and thought-memory are occurring alongside our present-day space.

Author Biography

Leslie Scalapino is the author of twenty-two books of fiction, poetry, plays and criticism, most recently Orchid Jetsam (Tuumba, 2002). Her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean, and Russian, and included in over twenty anthologies. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. She teaches at Bard College in the summer MFA Program and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angles, Mills College in Oakland, University of California at San Diego and Naropa Institute in Boulder.

Table of Contents

Note on Secret-Life Writing	15	(24)
PART I: INDIGO AT NIGHT
Dahlia	24	(9)
Dahlia's Iris	31	(2)
Flotillas	33	(5)
Liquid Red of Swallow's Mouth	38	(18)
PART II: THE CHAMP
The Champ	56	(6)
Relation Of Motion	62	(5)
Sauntering	67	(18)
Elude	71	(14)
PART III: THE SPINE'S DREAM
The Wave	85	(3)
Slaves' Outside Evening or Evening, Pal Mal Comic	85	(3)
Can Only Be Seen	88	(1)
The Driver	89	(2)
An Event At Night	91	(12)
Compressed Flesh, Pal Mal Comic	99	(1)
Pal Mal Comic, Or	100	(3)
The Terminator	103	(10)
PART IV: CONVERTED FROM LANGUAGE
Amber Turtles	113	(4)
Seeing The Dead and They Don't Know They're Dead	117	(8)
Bright Dark, Pal Mal Comic	123	(2)
Treasure Discoverer	125	(16)
Flower, Pal Mal Comic Book	135	(6)
PART V: THE WEDGE
Cloe's Turtle	141	(2)
Converted From Language	143	(8)
Air Pal Mal (The Frame)	144	(7)
PART VI: WILD ICE
Wild Ice	151	(13)
The Wedge	164	(3)
Time Flattened	167	(6)
As Joy Spatial-Crowd-Only And That Exists `as' One's Inner Life Also	173	(3)
Melinka's Owl	176	(3)
No Lost Actions	179	(7)
No Lost Actions, Pal Mal	179	(7)
The Footnotes	186	(13)
Andrew	199	(6)
Secret Autobiography	205