Throughout the poems that make up Portrait Without a Mouth, a follow up to Guruianu's Made in the Image of Stones, the Angel of History finally turns his head towards the present and lifts his eyes to the future. He sees the same ancient stones dotting the fields, the same ruins dusted off and resurrected only to be toppled again. Of those he meets he asks a single question: Where does history end, and where do we begin? Silence, a shrug of the shoulders. At the end of the day he shakes his head and mutters underneath his breath. Maybe a prayer. Language rearranged into a different version of tomorrow.
The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste explains and ultimately redeems our culture's fascination with discarded material objects as a means to encapsulate and shape the socio-cultural imagination. Printed in full color and includes references, an index, and over seventy hi-resolution color images.
Andrei Guruianu lives in New York City where he teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is the author of a memoir, Metal and Plum (Mayapple Press, 2010), and three collections of poetry: And Nothing Was Sacred Anymore (March Street Press, 2009), Front Porch World View (Main Street Rag, 2009), Days When I Saw the Horizon Bleed (FootHills Publishing, 2006). He is also the founder of the literary journal The Broome Review, and from 2008 to 2010 he served as the Broome County, NY Poet Laureate.
A poet and essayist attempt to find their bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Dead reckoning is the nautical term for calculating a ships position using the distance and direction traveled rather than instruments or astronomical observation. For those still recovering from the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, the term has an even grimmer meaning: toting up the butchers bill of war and genocide. As its title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to find our bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Conducted in the shadow of the centennial of the First World War, this dialogue between Romanian American poet Andrei Guruianu and Italian American essayist Anthony Di Renzo asks whether Western culture will successfully navigate the difficult waters of the new millennium or shipwreck itself on the mistakes of the past two centuries. Using historical and contemporary examples, they explore such topics as the limitations of memory, the transience of existence, the futility of history, and the difficulties of making art and meaning in the twenty-first century. Dead Reckoning pilots readers through the purgatory of immigration, a painful sea voyage that with enough courage and hard work can lead through the narrow channel facing paradise: spiritual and material success. Charting the currents between the Old and New Worlds, Andrei Guruianu and Anthony Di Renzo write with the ferocious genius of Pope and Swift and the compassionate heart of Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors and guardian of ports. Emanuel di Pasquale, author of The Oceans Will In the space of the passage from immigrant to citizen in a new home, things fall apart to an apparent nothingness. Guruianu and Di Renzo ask us to consider a brave creativity as an answer for the space where systems fall apart, so that it can be a place where things grow in a reverence for the need to live, to love, to have community, and to be truly free. Afaa M. Weaver, author of City of Eternal Spring A lovely, seductive, original book. Thomas G. Pavel, author of The Lives of the Novel: A History
In "Made in the Image of Stones" the past is not something you can learn about. It is the burden of inheritance, of a consciousness that we stand upon stones, that our foundations are shaky but they are all we have, that the image we have of ourselves is carved in the likeness of others. For more than eighty pages Guruianu carries the weight of this burden through poems where the surreal meets the painfully real, the strikingly vivid, a kinship that reveals the imperfect nature of memory as well as the limitations of individual consciousness and cultural identity. The signs are everywhere and they are chiseled in marble and molded in bronze. But we are also stubborn, the lap of history is not enough to hold us. Ultimately, while the poems bow to lineage and roots in our acceptance and humility, there is a refusal, a stubborn hope that the future isnt yet written in stone.
Dead reckoning is the nautical term for calculating a ship's position using the distance and direction traveled rather than instruments or astronomical observation. For those still recovering from the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, the term has an even grimmer meaning: toting up the butcher's bill of war and genocide. As its title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to find our bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Conducted in the shadow of the centennial of the First World War, this dialogue between Romanian American poet Andrei Guruianu and Italian American essayist Anthony Di Renzo asks whether Western culture will successfully navigate the difficult waters of the new millennium or shipwreck itself on the mistakes of the past two centuries. Using historical and contemporary examples, they explore such topics as the limitations of memory, the transience of existence, the futility of history, and the difficulties of making art and meaning in the twenty-first century.
The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste As one of its driving principles, The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste analyzes the double reconstitution of discarded items. In this afterlife, discarded objects might transform from a worthless object into a plaything or a work of art, and then to an artifact marking a specific historical time period. This transformation is represented through various forms of recollection—stories, photographs, collectibles, heirlooms, monuments, and more. Shaped by nostalgia and wishful thinking, discarded objects represent what is wasted, desired, and aestheticized, existing at the intersection of individual and collective consciousness. While The Afterlife of Discarded Objects constitutes a version of revisionist historiography through its engagement with alternative anthropological artifacts, its ambition stretches beyond that to consider how seemingly immaterial phenomena such as memory and identity are embedded in and shaped by material networks, including ephemera. Guruianu and Andrievskikh create a written, visual, and virtual playground where transnational narratives fuse into a discourse on the persistent materiality of ephemera, especially when magnified through narrative and digital embodiment. The Afterlife of Discarded Objects is printed in full color and includes references, an index, and over seventy hi-resolution color images. “The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste uses contemporary theory, literature, popular culture, and personal narratives to investigate how we assign political, socio-cultural, and aesthetic meaning to objects. The book is unique in applying personal narratives and testimonies of contributors from around the world to provide insights and critiques of Western attitudes toward these objects. The Afterlife of Discarded Objects provides transformative social commentary through scrutiny and stories of discarded/found objects in Eastern Europe and in the West encouraging us to reflect more critically on our relationships with things. The stories and theories interwoven in Guruianu and Andrievskikh’s book turn memory into matter and aspire to teach through their exploration. It’s a lofty goal, and the book succeeds.” —Sohui Lee
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