Writings
Available now at Small Press Distribution. Excerpts published online at Wheelhouse Magazine and Dusie.
The other day I was standing behind a couple in a grocery line, and what I saw between them was the space between two phrases in Elizabeth Bryant’s (nevertheless enjoyment—both a gap unbridgeable in that Zeno’s paradox way, and a connection made brilliant by currents of thought and significance. I now see Bryant’s interphrasal spaces everywhere. And when I don’t see them, I make them. Rather than penning journal entries after reflection upon a day’s events, Bryant pushes cognition through her days with this book—opening up consecutivity, complexity, redundancy, and simultaneity in charged paragraph forms. Through episodes with birds, lovers, and ideas, (nevertheless enjoyment is nothing short of a field guide to sentience. It is a resource to take into the grocery stores, meadows, workplaces, and bedrooms of one’s days. It is a reminder that meanings are made, not found. Use this book.
- Chris Vitiello
Elizabeth Bryant’s first full-length book is as heavy as any heart or head has a right to be, ripped out and sent screaming into a future that doesn’t resemble the past enough, that doesn’t resemble a future we could have predicted enough. But that vivid, red echo—the life we thought we were living, the life we thought we had a right to continue living—bursts out quietly in every piece in this tight volume, fraught with the harrowing realization that we wake up every day to a brand new day. (nevertheless enjoyment exists as a hymn to forgetting, a hope that the lives we’ve led will fade away behind us and allow us to live new lives, while simultaneously railing against the fact that this must be so. It’s refreshing to read new prose poetry that aims equally at head and heart, that is more unabashed than clever, that is wholly felt and thought through with a trajectory we identify as human. Bryant writes “Nothing I do does anything at all. Nothing has happened, yet I can’t breathe,” and we are chilled recognizing ourselves on the page.
- Nate Pritts
With vivid language that denies easily attained unambiguous and unlayered emotion, the pieces in (nevertheless enjoyment examine and reexamine what satisfaction means through the lens of intimate experience. From “slumps in the middle where history is,” to “the drab-colored female being more of a challenge,” Elizabeth Bryant portrays details of the human condition in surprising and unsettling terms. Central to this work of serial prose poetry is the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept “jouissance,” which is often loosely translated as “enjoyment.” Bryant uses the word to convey not only pleasure, achievement and satisfaction, but also fixation, obstruction and conflict. This nuanced volume conveys the sense that a precise understanding of jouissance is elusive, and may be fully perceived only in hindsight. Showing the influence of writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino and Carla Harryman, Elizabeth Bryant’s direct prose provides evidence of an ever-present life force that is at once ineffable and brutally powerful.
- Gian Lombardo