Seismosis
by John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse

Poetry. Art. African American Studies. Featuring line-drawings by Stackhouse and poems-as-essays by Keene—handed back and forth and back, written and rewritten, drawn and redrawn—SEISMOSIS penetrates the common ground between writing/literature and drawing/visual art, creating a revisioned landscape where much of the work is abstract or abstracted or both. The multiform agreements the texts & the drawings make, from a brilliant & decisive center, are revolutionary, antilinear, and highly responsive. SEISMOSIS is a formal experience. The result is a highly sophisticated call-and-response affair. A pioneer occasion, in which two African American artists have collaborated on a book of this nature, weaving a cohesive study of abstraction in both poetry and drawing, 1913’s printing of the acclaimed collaboration approaches fine-press quality in mass-produced, perfect-bound, book-as-art-object form—in keeping with 1913’s mission of integrating the visual and verbal zone.