Lucy Ives – författare

Manhattan, 2014. Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and her keys are at her parents' apartment, abandoned when she exited mid-dinner after her father-once again-lost control.Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she's written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who's recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn't sure what she's doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she's needed all along.With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives's latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, carry.

A revelatory anthology of poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by Madeline Gins, the transdisciplinary writer-artist-thinker famed for her “Reversible Destiny” architecturePoet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings—in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries—represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page. The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins’ 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins’ poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941–2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of “procedural architecture,” an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death.

For both aspiring and experienced authors, Ives' collection of writing exercises opens the door to a new world of possibilities to imagine, think, remember and writeThough there are 365 exercises for writing in this book, three six five is not simply a book of writing exercises. It is a "how-to" book of questions rather than answers, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an ars poetica of expanding possibility. Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Lucy Ives here offers encouragement, candor and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders and challenges of writing life. These prompts—in alchemical combinations with drawings by Nick Mauss—offer ways to become a (better) writer through observation, reorientation, inquiry, play and engagement with the world and its inhabitants. They invite the writer to learn and unlearn, to mine memory and forgetting, to enter impossible spaces and create new ways of telling time, to inhabit multiple, other and conflicting perspectives, to discover the elasticity of language and its constraints, to write by drawing, walking, listening and by being distracted.Lucy Ives is a novelist, poet and critic. Her essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America, won the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She has taught at Brown, Cornell and New York Universities and received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.