Errata 5uite
Joan Retallack
ISBN 13: 978-0-9619097-5-8
ISBN 0-9619097-5-7

64 pgs, Cover by the author
1993

$15.00

Recipient of the Columbia Book Award 1994

Selected by Robert Creeley


The germ for Joan Retallack's brilliantly inventive Errata 5uite lies in the coming together of that pedestrian object, the errata slip, with the five line musical staff. But watch out, "5uite" is not just "suite," and nothing the poet has read or thought about or imagined turns out to be quite what it seems. For Retallack, language is never only the means to an end; rather it is--subject, object, material, texture--the site (sight) of all our actions and imaginings. From the "Book of Nature whole as writ (Look!)" to the Book of Culture that is always already being (re)written, Retallack (the name itself a play on errata?) shares with the reader what it means to engage with the pleasure of the text.
--Marjorie Perloff


Joan Retallack's series of utopian errata slips returns error to its rightful place as wandering, itinerant astonishment. This is a poetry beyond right and wrong, where correction has given way to the sweet music of language as pure substitution, substantiation, surfeit. For prose read poetry, for theory read practice, for Retallack read & how!
--Charles Bernstein


Joan Retallack's is amazing. At the point where most poets stop, she takes off--into red shifts of imagination.
--Rosmarie Waldrop