Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes

Imane Boukaila is the author of Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes and a moving nomad thinker, daring to tress hope in tormented voids. She is a nonspeaking autistic poet and the co-founder of Hear Our Minds, an art movement motioning autistic revolution. She lives in Toronto.

Praise for Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes“Boukaila’s boundary-pushing debut explores truth, reluctance, and an unrestrained mind. [. . .] This challenging yet rewarding collection expands the concept of what language can do.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review "Hearing it is beauty itself. Boukaila is a dreamer who frees the reader freeing the mind to dream greet vex beauty. Make greeting freedom become reality by reading this treeing yearning freedom book yes yes."—Hannah Emerson, author of The Kissing of Kissing “This is an astonishing, time-bending book that has me dancing in cyclonic cycles of questioning and in delicate eddies of sound. In poems that perceive perception and trace thought itself, Imane Boukaila makes kinesthetic what is static, and makes static what moves too quickly for us to attend. Within controlled vocabularies, she moves between verse and essay, polemic and visual storms, with pirouetting improvisation and deft concrete strategies. In this, she participates in aesthetic traditions that host poets interested in the material page—as distinct as Derek Beaulieu and giovanni singleton, bpNichol and Larry Eigner—and poets whose quarrel and quandary is with the cusp of meaning where thought sunders to sound—Jordan Scott, Susan Howe, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Douglas Kearney. This book moved me in the very places where I was made still.”—Divya Victor, author of Curb“Words and letters swirl and eddy, weaving tresses of expressive intensity at the fracture zone between autistic thinking and the neurotypical ‘truths’ that rock and channel it. ‘Hacking language norms,’ as she puts it, Imane Boukaila ‘mistakes’ truth so as to trick it into restreaming into a resurgent dance of thought equal to the challenges and beauty of autistic experience. Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a turbulent achievement foaming with creative thinking and poetic inventiveness.”—Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the VirtualPraise for Imane Boukaila “Brimming with tumbling language, tactile sound, and vivid emotion, Imane Boukaila’s chapbook Truth OMG is a blend of sound and motion—a reading experience you can both hear and feel. . . . This chapbook unfurls, moving and stretching from the stiffness of isolation and institutional structures, through rivers of thoughts and trout, to a visceral expression of energy and selfhood. Reworking language and reshaping ideas in a continuous tumble, Truth OMG embodies the powerful motion it describes.”—PRISM International