Alien She (Klaus_eBooks)

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Alien She by Isaac Richard Pool, the second title in the Klaus_eBooks series, is the effect of combining a scrapbook and a chapbook in an ebook. Pool’s poetry has an uneven syntax, with figures and events pivoting mid-line and slipping out of definition. Subjects don’t stay still; “it” becomes “she” and vice versa as the uncertainty and instability of a body’s presence in space acquires a bodily presence of its own. The images that accompany Pool’s poems move from the telescoped depth of Photoshop collage to the rich grain of photos taken on a cheap camera and scanned, and from high-definition photos of scrap paper, with contours of rips and creases, to the numb white default of Word’s background. The images show costumes, cropped torsos, made-up faces, domestic spaces, modular sculptural improvisations in the studio and documentations of performances. From the pauses and stutters of the sequence comes the Alien She--an ethereal aspect of femininity that is neither a body nor a sense of self embodied in language, but a way that those things can relate to social spaces and worlds of objects.

Pool’s ideas about phantom femininity developed through an extended conversation with David Geer, Colin Self, and the late Mark Aguhar. Alien She includes contributions from all of them, but the insertions aren’t set apart from Pool’s works. They enter the flow of an already fragmented, open-ended text, forming a flickering presence of a collective body.

- Brian Droitcour