The Alphabet Conspiracy
- Availability: Confirm prior to ordering
- Branding: minimum 50 pieces (add’l costs below)
- Check Freight Rates (branded products only)
Branding Options (v), Availability & Lead Times
- 1-Color Imprint: $2.00 ea.
- Promo-Page Insert: $2.50 ea. (full-color printed, single-sided page)
- Belly-Band Wrap: $2.50 ea. (full-color printed)
- Set-Up Charge: $45 per decoration
- Availability: Product availability changes daily, so please confirm your quantity is available prior to placing an order.
- Branded Products: allow 10 business days from proof approval for production. Branding options may be limited or unavailable based on product design or cover artwork.
- Unbranded Products: allow 3-5 business days for shipping. All Unbranded items receive FREE ground shipping in the US. Inquire for international shipping.
- RETURNS/CANCELLATIONS: All orders, branded or unbranded, are NON-CANCELLABLE and NON-RETURNABLE once a purchase order has been received.
Product Details
Overview
The Alphabet Conspiracy takes its name from a 1950s -era school filmstrip of the same title. With a cast that includes patron saints for country girls and criminals, a Revolutionary War hero, the Wolfman, a sin-eater, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash, these poems swagger and sulk through an educational film turned film noir, replete with femme fatales in love. Mark Doty noted that the title poem "artfully addresses itself to the way children are taught to enter--and then become trapped by--a world constructed of language." Rita Mae Reese digs beneath the surface of dictionary entries to uncover their secrets and to discover some of her own, as in the poem "Womanless," stemming from a headword in Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary for which there is no entry:
And what about me? When I look in a mirror,
I see the parts of a woman; but if womanless
Can include me, then womanless like me too,
For a few months here--not in paradise of course,
But close enough--until you. Then nothing was close
Enough....
The Alphabet Conspiracy is about the ways in which language itself can function as a plot, keeping us estranged from ourselves, but also about the way it can be used as a tool for recovering our truest selves.
