FONO37 // Kimberly Alidio — Traceable Relation (print; book)
$20.00
A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief by Lambda Literary Award Filipino-American writer Kimberly Alidio.
At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In her ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from the diasporic arts of memory and survivance.
E-book available here.
About the Author
Kimberly Alidio is the author of Teeter (Nightboat Books, 2023), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*, 2020), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and others. Her essays have appeared in e-flux, Poetry Foundation, American Quarterly, Social Text, Journal of American History, and Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of the Nation and Diaspora. She lives on the unceded territories of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.
Press
Praise
“An exquisitely sculpted living-thinking-breathing work. Whenever I put it down I immediately want to pick it back up. Traceable Relation is everything I want to read.”
—Renee Gladman
“Any traceable relation points to untraceable voices, references and lineages too faint or tenuous to glimpse. Here, it prompts an ardent inquiry into the uses and limits of language, a foundational critique of colonial damage, and a tender appraisal of form. It’s no surprise that Chantal Akerman is among the many who inform this book which, like that director’s films, inhabits life in its spatial, sonic, and affective dimensions so we might experience realities in increments, word by word and shadow by shadow. Wielding citation as a loving practice, Kimberly Alidio invites us to reflect with care and rigor on fading and emerging legacies, even—and especially—when losses leave us reeling. Traceable Relation seeks a synthesis of what we inherit and what we claim.”
—Matt Longabucco
“To read Traceable Relation is to enter the space of Kimberly Alidio’s writing, where I am drawn through different voicings of grief, longing, and music (or narrative’s) “blurred edges around a fact.” Like a score interested in the history of sound—like Raven Chacon’s—or one that courses through history making several variations on a theme—like Julius Eastman’s—Alidio’s book explores (and enacts) the past’s framing of the present, lineage as a orchestral movement rather than notational device, dictum. I am both moved and changed by the ghosts this book contains, and the way a sentence can become a song, a screen, a record, another trace of utterance and love.”
—Alexis Almeida
