Born out of the author's exploration of Egon Schiele's work, region and era, "Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms" is a book length poem published in a stunning edition.

88 Pages - Perfect Bound

PRODUCTION PHOTOS

Price: $12

Written in part as a companion to the album Music for Egon Schiele by the band Rachel’s, this is a book-length poem divided into several sections of fragments and letters. It explores the links between the painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) and the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The painter and philosopher were both from Austro-Hungary, both served in World War I, both had ties to the painter Gustav Klimt, and both completely re-invented their own fields—though there is no evidence of them every having met. Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms develops links, even moving pictures, of their projects, bodies, and lives. The ghosts of Rilke and Georg Trakl (both of whom were funded by Wittgenstein) loom here alongside intertextual clips of Cole Swensen, Paul Celan, and Susan Howe. Just as Matmos, the electronic duo from the Bay Area and New York, re-imagines Rachel’s extraordinary music in Full on Night, this book re-imagines the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the midst of a war, in unfathomable decline, through an exploration of Schiele’s self-portraits, nudes, and landscapes of the Czech, Austrian, and Hungarian countrysides. Written over the period of four years when the author lived in Seattle, Bratislava, Tucson, Juneau, and Denver, the book is introduced by poet Jane Miller, who saw each piece through its earliest incarnations to its present one. Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms takes its title from a line in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s wonderful book Dictee. Pinball Publishing has released the book, the poet’s first, in a stunning edition which takes as its cover a rarely reproduced portrait of Schiele’s little sister Gerti from 1910.

"Reading Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms feels like standing behind a pane of glass watching the workings of a giant machine: flywheels, the latch catching the sprocket, but somewhere in the clockwork craft and synchronization, one realizes a startling and beautiful fact - that this machine, like ourselves, is designed only to keep going."

~Frank Montesonti, Sonora Review

"We are on a train that seems to multiply itself, ghostlike, as it goes; we can hear the smooth hiss and strange hitches of the cars; this is one way to tell a story, from inside a multiplying train. In it, the poem, is what history makes off with — bodies, stories, life, emotions contained within human bodies — but also what intimacies and traces of those things are carried through and beyond history, in drawings, in lines, in words.  I would say these are love poems, to the body, to a painter of bodies, to cities and history and birds.  Love makes a hole in the body, and silences and words rush in."

~ Eleni Sikelianos

Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson earned an MFA in poetry from University of Arizona and an MA in Film Studies from University College Dublin. He won both the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Rella Lossy Chapbook Prize from the San Francisco Poetry Center in 2003. He is the co-director, with Solan Jensen, of the forthcoming film Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape about the band Califone. Currently living in Colorado, he is completing a doctorate in literature and creative writing.