Limbinal

Description

Limbinal, as its hybrid title suggests, speaks in the porous space between a limb's articulations and a liminal border. Formally diverse, the pieces in Limbinal intersect prose fragments with incantatory dialogues, poetic footnotes with photographic phrases, rebellious translations with liquid transpositions. Against a backdrop of globalization fantasies heralding the new utopia, the fallout of nationalistic impulses, conflicts repeatedly arising out of rigid entrenchment, and the increasingly hazy distinction between public and private, voices struggle to cross, to intersect, to overlap. It is the permeable spaces arising between these voices that matter. Here, linguistic limbs fold and migrate, a distant border politicks and trips over the horizon, a river overflows, floods, palimpsests another river, Arendt's responsibility touches Deleuze's fold, the body, changeable, restless, searches for resonances. New translations of Paul Celan's Romanian poems become a generative field of language that sprout other limbs and broach other thresholds. A voice intimately addresses the border while multilingual subjectivities tackle radical responses. So the mouth, possibly hungering, possibly melodic, is always present, ready to disarticulate in order to articulate before the city gates, wobbly with struggle.

Exploring the infinite social, political, intimate possibilities of language, Oana Avasilichioaei's work traverses textual architecture, orality, and multilingualism (We, Beasts, 2012, winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry); translation and collaboration (Expeditions of a Chimaera, co-written with Erin Moure, 2009); geography and public space (feria: a poempark, 2008). In recent years, Avasilichioaei has also been mapping poetry into performative sound work (oanalab.com). Born in Romania and living in Montreal, Canada, she has translated poetry and prose from Romanian (Nichita Stanescu, Occupational Sickness, 2006, as well as Paul Celan) and from Quebecois French (Louise Cotnoir, The Islands, 2011; Daniel Canty, Wigrum, 2013; Bertrand Laverdure, Universal Bureau of Copyrights, 2014). Avasilichioaei has edited several magazine issues, including Poetry in Translation from Quebec, Aufgabe, New York, 2013, and The Mapping Issue, Dandelion, Calgary, 2011. Current projects include Thresholds, which transposes some of the work in Limbinal into sound performances and immersive installations, as well as a collaborative translation with Ingrid Pam Dick of Suzanne Leblanc's The House as P's Thinking, forthcoming 2015.