In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy

“Finished and finely wrung, this book is a linguistic experiment in active collaboration with matter–the dense data itself. Marjorie Welish, a painter in her multi-verse, leaves very little out though it may seem as if ruthless in being stark. But anaphora and lyricism lighten all passages. Her iridescent gray links her to Johns, and the very soft strophes of Morty Feldman. Her music may seem prolonged to some, but it is just long enough. I have been so impressed with her refusal of the dogmatic way. Her works are historical, social, and often lyrical in the desert, where the great dancers and the non-decorative architects meet, magically meet in one of our true baroque books of poetry. It’s not by accident that she appears in The Fold of Deleuze.” —David Shapiro

In her new collection, painter, poet, and critic Marjorie Welish presents two books in one. “In the Futurity Lounge” may be read as that de-centered laboratory of themodern futurity lounge where experimental works are in a constant state of being constructed. Her poems are written across, through, and at the expense of urban sites, themselves part architecture, part language, including Roebling’s Aqueduct, Wright’s Fallingwater, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line, and Rem Koolhaas’s student center at Illinois Tech. “Asylum for Indeterminacy” is an extended zone of research devoted to translation constructed freely from a few given words from prior translations. Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” is the provocation.