Critical Commentary
for my poetry book, meant to wake up feeling:
"The work done in this book is desperately necessary. The next time someone grumbles about the uselessness of poetry, put these poems in their hands." --Rain Taxi
"The grace, honesty, and bravery with which [Herman] addresses issues that many won't touch with a ten-foot pole will shake you to the core." --Blotterature
for my poetry book, to go without blinking:
Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: "This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection." I liked that. A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that's just page one. Throw away "the color pink," writes Herman, deeper in. And: "Gender is best received in a question mark." In not with. I loved that. This is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register:" where the label was rubbed." Until there's nothing left but, as the writer says: "The most dangerous parts of me." What those "dangerous parts" become, reconfigured, mutilated and grown again, is the text of this "sore" and "feminine" book. A book in which "words" and beloveds, of various kinds: "never stop coming." What kind of cyborg is this?
—Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University.
Gizzards: a word my grandmother used to mean bloody, messy, entangled innards. These are gizzard-poems. Even if the important parts are blurred you can hear the sound of envelopes unlatching, you can become the redhead body for a while. Herman tells us do not approach the scars...disobey her and masturbate while reading this book. Then go snap a pencil in half. Yes, it’s like that.
— Jackie Sheeler, author of Earthquake Came to Harlem
Aimee Herman celebrates and contradicts our expectations in her disturbing juxtapositions of unexpected images. This is a book poised to define the poet’s title and premise: “How can one edit the typos found in scar tissue.” Reading these poems challenges our comfort zone and confronts us with an ever-moving visceral vitality. The poet’s lyrical scrutiny considers all angles and actions as in the “shape of angled knuckles surfing into / independent variable”. She is breaking through taboos of language we never knew we had. Her tangled metaphors morph into surreal visions. Unpredictable, a sexuality of the unexpected that demands our engagement even as the language soaks us ever deeper into inexplicable non-outcomes that riddle like questions in a Zen koan. Experimental and disarmingly playful, these lines are a testimony, a political investigation into a sensuality that refuses conclusion.
— Maureen Owen, author of Erosion's Pull
Aimee Herman writes so often in the imperative because she and her world insist on the NOW of the body, society, and language. She brings us the world both embodied and cataloged, alienated yet familiar. Her words are a recipe for seeing differently. Blink at your own delicious peril.
— Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive
Aimee Herman’s to go without blinking is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates “sturdy retinas” in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here-- not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page—it is body and page as planar path, “leaking teeth”—“a need to disrobe to satisfy.” Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book...
